The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City 9781503631984

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The Battle Nearer to Home

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The Battle Nearer to Home

The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

Christopher Bonastia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

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Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Bonastia, Christopher, author. Title: The battle nearer to home : the persistence of school segregation in New York City / Christopher Bonastia. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021039233 (print) | LCCN 2021039234 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503628472 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631977 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503631984 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Segregation in education—New York (State)—New York—History. | School integration—New York (State)—New York—History. | Education and state— New York (State)—New York—History. Classification: LCC LC212.523.N496 B66 2022 (print) | LCC LC212.523.N496 (ebook) | DDC 379.2/6309747—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039233 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039234 Cover graphics: Street map of NYC, Library of Congress. Graphic inspired by New York Times chart, 1977, “Changing Composition of City’s Public Schools.” Typeset by Newgen North America in Minion Pro 10/15

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To my Lehman College students, past and present

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix List of Prominent Individuals  xiii Map of Manhattan and the Bronx  xvi Map of Brooklyn and Queens  xvii

1 Diverse but Segregated

1

2 The Case for School Integration

18

3 “Good Neighborhoods Do Not Just Happen”

46

4 Inflamed

81

5 The Roots of Community Control

107

6 Ocean Hill–­Brownsville’s Afrocentric, Multicultural Vision

139

7 Race and Education after Community Control

172

8 The Renewed Demand for Integration

205

9 Learning from the Past and Moving Forward

232

Notes  241 Selected Bibliography  289 Index  293

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Acknowledgments

This book completes a trilogy of sorts on the politics of racial segregation. The Battle Nearer to Home, to my sad surprise, took the longest to write. This is partially due to the vastness of New York City history and politics. But I think this lengthy journey can also be traced to the fact that this project hits closer to home than my prior two books. The title, however, is not a personal reference: it alludes to school integration activist Milton Galamison’s observation that white New Yorkers’ commitment to racial justice withered when the focus moved from the South to their own backyards. I live in Brooklyn, as I have for most of the last twenty-­five years. When I first began researching this book, my son was seven. Now he is sixteen, attending a public high school. As the white parent of a Black, biracial child, the spouse of a Black woman, and a believer in integration, I often wondered how the school choices my wife, Rebecca, and I made for him—­and later with him—­might best reflect our wider beliefs about social justice and equity. We wanted him to be surrounded by students from a broad range of backgrounds, but particularly Black peers. Of course, we wanted him to attend a school that nurtured him, that challenged him, that sparked him. When we were navigating New York City’s exhausting and stressful high-­school admissions process, I researched. I scheduled school visits. I created spreadsheets. (I’m an academic—­that’s what we do.) Like many parents, I had qualms about the hypercompetitive admissions process that sorts students into sought-­after, acceptable, and last-­resort schools. Rebecca and I wondered whether we should focus on predominantly Black schools or the more coveted schools with disproportionate numbers of white students. We certainly would not send him to a school where he was one of a few Black students, but what percentage was acceptable? We didn’t have an exact number. Moreover, anyone familiar with New York City middle and high school admissions knows that as a parent you aren’t exactly choosing schools. You rank them, ix

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Acknowledgments

they rank you, and you see where the algorithm matches you. We got our fifth choice and are mostly happy with it. Not everyone is so fortunate. I hope that this book offers readers a nuanced understanding of how New York City education officials historically have addressed—­or more often danced around—­the issue of integration. I hope it gives readers a better grasp of where the politics of school integration and equity stand today, and where they may be going. And I pray that it prompts readers to think about integration far more broadly than an outdated focus only on “body mixing.” I would like to thank Asia Bailey and Shereka Matthews for their help with research assistance. Courtney Essien’s honors thesis on contemporary colorblind racism helped me to refine some of my own conceptual points. Sara Rosado went above and beyond in offering thoughtful, constructive feedback on several iterations of the manuscript. Jane Jones at Up In Consulting provided valuable commentary on an early draft of the manuscript, which was a mess. In spring 2017, I had the opportunity to be a fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative. During that time, I received detailed comments from faculty and student fellows on an early draft of a book chapter. (That chapter was not included in the final manuscript, but I still appreciate the feedback!) Thanks to Don Robotham, Kay Powell, and Christie Sillo for their efforts to make my time there enjoyable and productive. In fall 2019, I presented a chapter (which made it into the book) at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History annual meeting in North Charleston, South Carolina. This conference is always inspiring and captivating. Special shout to Devin Fergus, Nichole Nelson, and my Lehman colleague Nick Boston for joining me on the panel and responding to my work. I’d also like to thank another Lehman colleague, Shehzad Nadeem (aka Shezzy Nice), for providing comments on a chapter in progress. I want to acknowledge all my departmental colleagues for their support and friendship, especially the chairs under whom I have served: Madeline Moran, Elin Waring, and Kofi Benefo. I also must recognize Miriam Medina, our administrative assistant and a dear friend, and Dean Pam Mills, who has been very understanding as I continued this research after taking on the post of departmental chair in July 2020. As I was immersing myself in the history of school integration politics in New York City, I almost missed the story of what is happening right now: beginning in the early 2010s, high school students here have been waging an impassioned campaign demanding that the city finally act decisively to foster integration.

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Acknowledgments

xi

Their conception of integration reaches far beyond body mixing, incorporating responsive and demographically reflective teaching staff, equalization of resources across schools, decriminalization of students of color, and an end to the screening practices that sort students into schools by race and socioeconomic status. The opportunity to interview some of these young activists and their adult mentors was the highlight of my research. I thank members of IntegrateNYC and Teens Take Charge for taking the time to share their inspiring vision for the future of education. I also wish to recognize Charlie Isaacs, whose firsthand account of community control in New York City proved highly influential to me, and who graciously shared pizza and insights with me at his home upstate. Much gratitude to Nyah Berg, Matt Gonzales, Taylor McGraw, and the late Zipporiah Mills for speaking with me and to the numerous archivists who helped me navigate historical materials. Black scholars are still marginalized too often. If they kept their distance from white scholars, particularly those who study race, I wouldn’t blame them. Thankfully, the vast majority of Black scholars whom I have crossed paths with have been unfailingly supportive and generous. Aldon Morris, Tiffany Joseph, Assata Kokayi, Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum, Waldo Martin, and Keeanga-­Yamahtta Taylor are just some of the many to whom I am indebted. My editor at Stanford University Press, Marcela Maxfield, took an early interest in this project, and I am thrilled that I was able to collaborate with her on this project. She is a star. Marcela’s editorial assistant, Sunna Juhn, patiently answered my annoying questions about formatting endnotes and other matters. Copyeditor Barbara Armentrout and the two anonymous reviewers read the manuscript with great care, and this book is better for their efforts. Thank you to the entire staff at SUP for helping this project come to life. Rebecca, Kofi, and I weathered the pandemic surprisingly well in our tiny Brooklyn apartment. I am so grateful for their love, good humor, and grace during this stressful and extraordinary time. Much love to our chosen family, which includes Caryn Rivers, Anwar Alcide, Davira Jimenez, and Dorlan Kimbrough. My students at Lehman College have been a replenishing source of joy and inspiration since I arrived on campus in 2004. (During the COVID-­19 pandemic, I have missed Lehman’s beautiful campus, and the electric energy of our students.) Several of them, including Asia, Shereka, and Sara, have contributed in direct ways to the manuscript, and hundreds of others have offered valuable

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insights and a sense of community inside and outside the classroom. In the face of a pandemic that hit the Bronx with particular fury, their resilience and determination are extraordinary. I dedicate this book to them.

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Prominent Individuals

NYC School Superintendents and Chancellors during the Years of Study William Jansen, 1947–­58 John Theobald, 1958–­62 Calvin Gross, 1963–­65 Bernard Donovan, 1965–­69 Harvey Scribner (Chancellor), 1970–­1973 Carmen Farina (Chancellor), 2014–­18 Richard Carranza (Chancellor), 2018–­2021 Other Prominent Public Figures Note: All the individuals listed below are men. Women—­among them, Ella Baker, Babette Edwards, and Annie Stein—­played key roles in the battle for school integration and equity. Many of their adversaries were also women. However, during the integration disputes from the 1950s through the 1970s, men were the public faces, while women played crucial but underappreciated roles as organizers and foot soldiers. See Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-­American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). James E. Allen: New York State Commissioner of Education, 1955–­69. Subsequently appointed US Commissioner of Education. Kenneth B. Clark: Psychologist whose testimony in Brown v. Board of Education proved pivotal to the plaintiff ’s victory. Became a long-­term advocate for school integration and educational equity in New York City and State. Served on the New York State Board of Regents from 1966 to 1986.

xiii

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xiv

Prominent Individuals

James Donovan: Board of Education President, 1963–­65. Reverend Milton Galamison: Brooklyn minister who became the most prominent advocate for school integration in New York City during the late 1950s and 1960s. John Lindsay: Mayor of New York City, 1966 to 1973, a period that included the fierce battle over community control of schools. Preston Wilcox: Long-­time Harlem advocate who became known as “the father of community control.”

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MAP 1  Manhattan and the Bronx. Neighborhoods in bold are discussed within the text. Inset:

The five boroughs of New York City.

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MAP 2  Brooklyn and Queens. Neighborhoods in bold are discussed within the text.

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The Battle Nearer to Home

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1

Diverse but Segregated

event for student activists, New York City schools chancellor Richard Carranza fervently insisted: “No, we will not wait to integrate our schools, we will not wait to dismantle the segregated systems we have!” But by August of that year, he conceded: “If I integrated the system, the next thing I’m going to do is . . . walk on water.”1 Carranza was following a path worn by NYC education officials who, for decades, promised to integrate city schools before inevitably explaining their failure as a product of popular resistance, logistical complexities, and demographic realities. Such roadblocks, they’d say, were too imposing to surmount. The vows to integrate New York City schools began in earnest following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown, the NYC Board of Education insisted, “reminds us that modern psychological knowledge indicates clearly that segregated, racially homogenous schools damage the personality of minority group children. These schools decrease their motivation and thus impair their ability to learn. White children are also damaged. Public education in a racially homogenous setting is socially unrealistic and blocks the attainment of the goals of a democratic education, whether this segregation occurs by law or by fact.”2 In retrospect the board’s claims of personality damage, subdued motivation, and learning impairment as result of segregation are problematic, given the implication that schools with entirely Black and Brown student bodies are doomed to failure. Nevertheless, the board admitted for the first time its obligation to dismantle school segregation in New York City. Four years later, the board-­appointed Commission on Integration addressed the issue even more directly: “Whether school segregation is the effect of law and custom as in the South, or has its roots in residential segregation, as in New York City, its defects are inherent and incurable. In education there can be no such thing as ‘separate but equal.’ Educationally, as well as morally and socially, AT A SPR IN G 2019

1

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Chapter 1

the only remedy for the segregated school is its desegregation.”3 Yet over the ensuing decades, while top school officials were happy to advocate integration in principle, they chafed at appeals for the city to implement integration in practice. In 1964, amid threats by local civil rights organizations to launch a massive school boycott against segregation, Board President James Donovan unleashed his exasperation with their demands: “We are running a board of education, not a board of integration or board of transportation.”4 Over the next few years, weary pro-­integration activists would conclude that city officials were unwilling to prioritize integration in the face of white resistance and searched for alternatives to secure quality education for Black and Puerto Rican students. The New York City school system remains highly segregated. A 2012 New York Times report found that among large urban school systems, only those of Chicago and Dallas were more segregated than New York’s. Two years later, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA concluded that at the state level, New York had the most segregated school system. A 2021 update to that report found that New York remains the most segregated state for Black students, and lags behind only California in the segregation of Latino students.5 In the decades since the Brown decision, New York City has failed to advance integration and equity in a meaningful manner, despite its reputation as a proudly diverse and tolerant city and one leading in scientific and industrial progress. In some respects, the lack of progress on school integration is unsurprising. While the benefits of liberal interventions such as hospitals and transportation seemed to be universal, school integration efforts—­particularly as more whites left and more Black and Puerto Rican residents arrived—­were perceived by whites as a zero-­sum game.6 To this day, no big city has successfully integrated its school system, much less one that was under no judicial or federal agency mandate in the two decades after Brown v. Board of Education. Maximum school integration in a city the size of New York would have been an enormously complex, voluntary, and largely unpopular effort that most, if not all, top officials in the Board of Education and city government did not believe in. (Some education officials did seek to increase integration incrementally, where possible.) The Battle Nearer to Home assesses two periods in New York City history when issues of integration and equity were on the agenda of the Board of Ed and activist groups: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the city’s fiscal crisis (mid-­1970s), and from the early 2010s to the present. Why the gap between the mid-­1970s and

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Diverse but Segregated

3

the 2010s? In order for an integration-­and-­equity program to have an authentic chance of enactment and implementation, integration and equity have to be on the docket of the Board of Education, elected officials, and activist groups. During the forty-­year gap, as well as prior to 1954, these issues were not foregrounded in public discourse. The placement of an issue on the agenda is not sufficient to ensure enactment and implementation, but it is essential. With its exploration of the contemporary wave of pro-­integration activism, this book reveals how the current New York City school system, with its strengths and faults, came to be. It will also enable readers to understand current pro-­integration activism in historical context. Throughout these pages, I examine policies and practices of the New York City Board of Education that perpetuated a system in which Black and Puerto Rican children often attended substandard, segregated schools that fundamentally failed them, but a system that also retained the glint of integration and inclusion. Perhaps the most crucial obstacle to fashioning an exemplary school system in New York was that virtually all the stakeholders in the system—­politicians, school officials throughout the massive bureaucracy, the teachers union (the United Federation of Teachers), and the clear majority of white parents—­were only willing to support policies and arrangements that required them to make minimal (or no) sacrifices, while offering token concessions to those demanding comprehensive changes to a broken system. The board’s mode of operation was to maintain high-­quality education and a semblance of measured integration in a limited number of schools, with whites remaining the distinct numerical majority in those venues even when they became less than half of the school population. I describe how the Board of Ed, with the support of city officials, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and the majority of white parents, sustained limited, numerical integration and rampant segregation simultaneously. These groups had decisive advantages over Black and Puerto Rican parents who were calling for meaningful steps to increase integration and equity. In addition to possessing greater political influence, integration opponents were aligned with the sprawling Board of Ed’s proclivity for resisting change.7 The board, then, was largely swimming with the tide of public opinion—­or at least the views of those with greater influence: the working-­and middle-­class white families who had little interest in the transformation of a system that seemed to serve most of their children relatively well and teacher organizations

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4

Chapter 1

that were unwilling to relinquish any power in order to improve the education of poorly served students. Because the city was never under an order from federal courts or agencies to address the segregation of students, any solution would have to come from New Yorkers. Thus, the actions by the Board of Education must be assessed in relation to the influence of pro-­and anti-­integration activists, political officials, the UFT, and other actors. In accounting for the very limited steps that the city took to confront school segregation, I assess how the board and other supporters of the status quo attempted to legitimate or justify these actions and inactions in the most cosmopolitan of cities. These rationales did nothing to mitigate the racist indifference to Black and Puerto Rican educational aspirations that left many of these students alienated or abandoned by the school system. Desegregation and Integration The terms desegregation and integration are often used interchangeably, which can result in a lack of clarity. According to Jennifer Ayscue and Erica Frankenberg: “Desegregation” refers to a legal or political process of ending the separation and isolation of different racial and ethnic groups. Desegregation is achieved through court order or voluntary means. “Integration” refers to a social process in which members of different racial and ethnic groups experience fair and equal treatment within a desegregated environment. Integration requires further action beyond desegregation.8 

In this book, I refer primarily to the concept of integration for two reasons. First, the push for reduced racial isolation in New York City schools did not occur under legal compulsion, and its advocates confronted a system where pockets of numerical integration did occur. (In some instances, I use the terms numerical integration and statistical integration to emphasize that particular proposals or initiatives narrowly focused on adjusting school demographics rather than more expansive conceptions of integration.9) Second, the activists who demanded the reduction of racial isolation in schools were not merely seeking demographic changes to school populations. While early demands for integration did largely focus on creating more diverse classrooms, “integration” evolved to incorporate a deep educational commitment to Black youth and other students of color, a curriculum free of cultural bias, and a teaching staff that reflected the diversity of the

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student body. Ironically, the scope of integration widened during the late 1960s experiment with community control of schools, often viewed as a rejection of integration. In brief, community-­control advocates concluded that the Board of Education and the UFT were not interested in the education of Black and Brown students, so Black and Brown communities should be authorized to operate local schools themselves, with authority over teacher hiring, curriculum, budget allocations, and so on. What community-­control activists often rejected was not integration per se, but how it was practiced. As Leslie Campbell (who later renamed himself Jitu Weusi), a pivotal figure in the community-­control movement, observed, the type of integration pursued by the Board of Education was often focused narrowly on “a mixing of bodies,” with no tangible changes to the larger educational system.10 Skepticism about integration as it happened on the ground was common. The Black social worker Preston Wilcox exemplified this ambivalence. At the same time that he was becoming a prominent voice advocating for community control of schools in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods as an alternative to integration, he enrolled his son in an integrated private school (see chapter 5). He described integration as “the sharing of a mutually self-­reaffirming educational experience by students of a variety of ethnic, religious, social, and economic backgrounds . . . designed to enable students to establish co-­equal relationships and to understand the true nature of society.”11 By “true nature,” Wilcox presumably meant that such education must incorporate a frank assessment of the rampant racial oppression and exploitation that have scarred the United States from its earliest days, as well as a rigorous exploration of the vast contributions that African Americans and other marginalized groups have made to the nation’s political, social, cultural, and economic life. The purpose of this book is not to build a case for the benefits of school integration; the evidence is clear. Most recently, the economist Rucker C. Johnson makes a highly persuasive case that school integration, when thoughtfully implemented and accompanied by equitable school funding and robust pre-­ school investments, is the most potent weapon against educational inequality.12 These caveats are crucial: curating a demographically diverse classroom or school is insufficient to create a meaningfully integrated environment. We will see numerous examples of this constricted brand of curated “integration” in the pages that follow.

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Chapter 1

Border Checkpoints In a 1971 article, the educational activist Annie Stein characterized the Board of Ed’s strategy as containment through segregation. One-­hundred-­percent segregation was not possible logistically or legally, and there is no evidence to suggest that this was a concealed goal of Board of Ed members or other influential city officials. Nevertheless, they did have ample incentive to minimize integration, given their fears that white, middle-­class families would exit the public schools, or the city altogether, if their children’s schools became “too” integrated. The Board of Ed maintained segregation through school zoning policies, limits on student transfers for integration, and placement of most new schools in segregated neighborhoods. They attempted to chip away at the legitimacy of the integration movement by regularly affirming the board’s commitment to integration, enacting carefully limited integration “experiments,” and blaming failure on the parents, other agencies, and lack of funds. As Stein observed, multiple stakeholders jealously protected the benefits they accrued from racial segregation in schools, neighborhoods, and the workplace: Roughly half a billion dollars a year is involved, and many fingers are in the pie—­the construction workers’ unions, the real estate owners and speculators, the dozens of contractors and suppliers, the Catholic Church which must protect the value of its large land holdings, the politicians whose power rests on the patronage they can command, and organized crime. Any break in the rigid color line means loss of real estate profits; residential segregation is highly profitable on both sides of the line. Whites can be sold houses at high prices if they are assured that their schools will stay white. House-­hungry Blacks can be charged higher rents because they cannot move out of the ghetto. An integrated school is thus a foot in the door of housing segregation and a serious threat to profits.13

The BOE strategy can be understood as utilizing border checkpoints to manage integration. Historically, the BOE used some of these checkpoints to actively block integration or help white parents avoid it. In many cases, however, the BOE used these checkpoints to support integration in principle, while limiting it sharply in practice. These checkpoints were not of the George-­Wallace-­ standing-­in-­the-­schoolhouse-­door variety. Rather, they served to sharply restrict

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the number of low-­income or Black and Brown children who were offered access to middle-­class, predominantly white school spaces with far greater resources. I identify three primary categories of checkpoints. The first is physical, which most prominently incorporates the selection of school construction sites and zoning decisions. For example, the board often selected sites for new schools in the heart of segregated, low-­income neighborhoods, arguing that these new schools would do the most to relieve school overcrowding where the problem was most acute. Zoning exemplifies the porosity of checkpoints. While there are egregious historical examples of the board zoning for segregation, in many cases it was virtually impossible to maintain rigidly segregated school zones. Instead, the board might carve out some intensely segregated zones in order to create other zones that had some numerical integration but maintained a white majority. The second checkpoint is administrative. In these instances, the board would convey its support for integration, while delaying or limiting action that would foster widespread integration. One-­way, voluntary transfer programs allowing students in overcrowded, segregated Black and Puerto Rican schools to transfer to underutilized, primarily white ones provide one example of an administrative checkpoint. Said transfers were limited in number, sometimes attached to specific time frames, promising receiving schools that students of color would pass through the checkpoint in “reasonable” proportions and eventually exit. Nevertheless, white parents often objected, sometimes furiously. Another prominent tactic was to commission a study, await recommendations, then bury the report once it was delivered. This bureaucratic burial has endured. Most recently, the extensive recommendations of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group yielded minimal action to address school segregation in the city.14 The Board of Ed also tended to launch limited demonstration projects, then pull the plug on them before anyone could assess the results fairly or make a case for expansion. In a smaller number of cases, particularly committed Black parents refused to enroll their children in low-­achieving, segregated public schools. After intimidation tactics (such as threatening to remove the children from parental custody) failed to dissuade the parents, the board agreed to place the children in a school the parents found acceptable. That school was rarely the one parents had identified and was never part of a more comprehensive attempt to improve schools serving low-­income students or afford other children in blatantly inadequate schools the opportunity to enroll in higher-­quality,

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Chapter 1

integrated schools. If all else failed in appeasing angry parents, the board would claim administrative impotence, pleading that the obstacles to integration were too onerous. These included residential segregation, the threat of increasing white flight, changing neighborhood (and city) demographics, and the logistics of transporting children outside their neighborhood in a crowded and at-­times chaotic city. While these impediments were real, they did not preclude the board from strategically advancing integration while improving education in schools that remained segregated. The third checkpoint is meritocratic, enacted through school screening and tracking. It is the most enduring and the most jealously guarded by its direct beneficiaries—­parents whose children are admitted to “good” public schools—­as well as the Board of Education (now Department of Education) and politicians at the local and state levels. Currently, New York City high school activists are leading a sustained and passionate campaign to end various forms of school screening, which sorts students into schools with vastly differing resources, prestige, and levels of racial and socioeconomic diversity. As school admissions policies have changed over the decades, so have some of the details. However, the basic sorting mechanisms remain as effective as ever. Historically, elementary school students would attend their neighborhood school. The quality of the education—­including school resources, the experience of the teaching staff, and teacher beliefs in their students’ ability to learn—­correlated highly with the location and demographics of the school. Children in mostly white, middle-­class schools typically did well. Children in low-­income, primarily Black and Puerto Rican schools often faced low teacher expectations and fared poorly; many became estranged from the school system.15 When students attended their zoned middle school, the outcomes were repeated. As geographic assignment receded, middle schools increasingly screened and sorted students on the basis of standardized test scores, grades, and attendance. By the time students applied to high schools, which were then less frequently zoned (and are now primarily unzoned), the sorting was complete, with white students (and, later, Asian students) filling disproportionate numbers of seats in the most prestigious and well-­resourced, screened schools. These schools all include Black and Latino student populations: in some, a mere smattering (as in the well-­known Stuyvesant High School), and in others, upwards of 30 percent (as in Beacon High School).16 Disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino

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students continue to be tracked into vocational high schools, schools serving students with low grades and/or standardized test scores, and schools for students alleged to have behavioral or emotional issues.17 At a May 2020 commemoration of the Brown v. Board decision, one high school student crystallized the sorting of students in NYC schools: “People say numbers don’t lie. Good, smart students get good grades and are thereby entitled to the city’s bulk of resources. The rest of us are left to fight over the scraps. This is the logic of our school system.” Or, as current integration advocate Taylor McGraw observes: “We have some schools that are built for kids with As and Bs, and then we have a whole lot of schools that are built for kids with Cs through Fs.”18 Whereas students at specialized and screened high schools typically enjoy well-­maintained, modern facilities and a lengthy menu of courses and extracurricular offerings, students at unscreened high schools often endure unkempt and outdated facilities, vermin, fewer academic and extracurricular programs (including fewer sports teams), scarce and/or outdated textbooks, and congested hallways and classrooms. Moreover, at high schools that serve a primarily Black and Latino student body, students may wait as long as forty minutes outdoors to pass through metal detectors before gaining access to school facilities.19 The sought-­after, statistically integrated schools could not exist without a much larger number of segregated, low-­income, Black and Brown schools. (I use the term statistically integrated here to indicate that Black and Brown students at elite public schools often report feeling alienated and “out of place” and in that sense do not feel that they are in an authentically integrated environment.20) In 2021, “colorblind meritocracy” through admissions screening, which New York does far more than any other American city, is the legitimator and linchpin of school segregation and inequity in the Big Apple. Screening effectively sorts students by race and class without using these criteria explicitly, shrouding segregation beneath the veneer of fairness.21 Checkpoints are not always centralized. As we see in Glendale-­Ridgewood (Queens), Jackson Heights (Queens), Canarsie (Brooklyn), and other neighborhoods examined in subsequent chapters, local white residents at times contested the NYC Board of Education’s ability to be the sole checkpoint for enrolling students. Their primary recourse was physical, such as trying to intimidate incoming students or picketing schools. Local school boards also resorted to administrative checkpoints to prevent the enrollment of students or hasten their exit. At the

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school level, administrators and teachers enforced meritocratic checkpoints by sorting students into different academic tracks, often at a very early age. This sorting typically mapped onto racial and class distinctions, but not always. Some Black students—­among them, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and the psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research proved key in the Brown decision—­passed through NYC’s educational checkpoints, serving to legitimate the system for its defenders.22 While previous scholars have sought to unravel the mechanisms of segregation in various realms of public and private life, my border-­checkpoints typology is distinctive in documenting how an urban school board maintained a “manageable” degree of integration in the face of widespread segregation, rather than vying for maximum possible segregation. My typology highlights the role of inaction (for example, commissioning studies without implementing their recommendations) in attempts to maintain orderly inertia, and it explains how meritocracy evolved to become the central legitimator of limited school integration.23 The border-­checkpoints framework also sheds light on the historical demographic composition of the New York City teaching and supervisory force, which was far less diverse than in other large cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia.24 Although the UFT pointed to the hiring and promotion system as an exemplar of colorblind meritocracy, often it was neither. Teachers commonly obtained supervisory positions through personal networks rather than proven merit.25 Border checkpoints are the mechanisms through which a “white veto” can be imposed upon educational measures that constrict the educational options or contradict the preferences of white families. Camille Walsh draws the connection between the white veto and rhetorical claims that white families deserved a disproportionate voice in educational matters due to their status as taxpayers, a vague, racially and economically coded designation. In New York City, educational officials implicitly acknowledged the white veto by claiming that aggressive integration policies would prompt more white families to leave the city, resulting in loss of tax revenue and a more difficult road to school integration.26 The white veto implies that educational decision-­makers did, in some instances, make strategic choices to approve halting (and often inadequate) concessions to Black demands, as in the optional-­transfer and community-­control experiments. They felt secure in the knowledge that they subsequently could discontinue any of these experiments if the white heat—­from families, the teachers

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union, politicians, or school officials themselves—­rose to a worrisome degree. The concept of a white veto captures the preference for the status quo (which accrued benefits to white families), the flexibility to make occasional concessions to Black and Puerto Rican demands, and the ability to pivot from these concessions if the backlash became significant.  Why New York City? While the gulf between ideology and practice in New York has always been especially wide, its status as a diverse-­but-­segregated school system remains the norm among large cities. In fact, historically diverse districts such as New York City are less likely to be integrated than districts that have recently become diverse. The latter group mainly comprises small cities and suburban towns that had been historically white but have experienced increasing enrollments of students of color, who in most cases are Hispanic or Asian. Researchers often measure district integration by gauging the extent to which schools within their boundaries reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the district as a whole. In a city with over 1.1 million public school students (including charter schools) and where four racial/ethnic groups each have at least a 15 percent share of the school population, it is hardly shocking that many schools in the five boroughs vary substantially from these proportions.27 Still, New York City can do better than it is doing. In the decades since Brown v. Board of Education, white students have gone from a majority to 15 percent of public school students. Black students are around 25 percent in the most recent data, though the proportion of first-­and second-­ generation Black immigrants has risen sharply. Latino students, who in earlier decades were overwhelmingly Puerto Rican, hail from an array of nations and have become the largest racial/pan-­ethnic group in the school system at 41 percent. Asian students, who through the ’50s and ’60s constituted a very small percentage of the overall student body, are considerably more prominent, constituting 16 percent of the city’s public school population. Roughly 70 percent of students face economic hardship.28 Many school segregation measures are calculated at the metropolitan level. New York City is included in a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) that also incorporates Long Island, some areas of Upstate New York, much of New Jersey, and a small area of northeastern Pennsylvania. One measure of school

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segregation, the variance-­ratio index, gauges the isolation of Black and Latino students from their peers from other racial groups. The New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago MSAs look similar in their degrees of school segregation: they are all roughly halfway between maximum integration and maximum segregation, given the racial demographics of their populations. The MSAs that include Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, and Atlanta tilt somewhat more in the direction of integration, though all of them maintain a substantial level of school segregation. Typically, MSAs that incorporate smaller cities fare better on this index.29 The historical racial composition of the teaching force, mentioned above, is one element that makes New York stand out from other large cities. Another is that the purported winners of the meritocracy, Jewish teachers from the ’50s through the ’70s, and Asian students in recent decades, are individuals from historically disadvantaged groups. As Jerald Podair recounts, the meritocratic culture “was built around an ideology of marketplace competition between self-­ reliant individuals, who were judged by standards of ‘objective merit’ divorced from considerations of racial group origin.”30 Consequently, beneficiaries of purportedly meritocratic competition, whether students or teachers, could argue that this was a fair system that prevented racial unfairness rather than fueling it. Such a claim appeared more credible when coming from communities that had experienced racial or religious discrimination firsthand. Earlier than most other cities, New York confronted the question of how to assess integration in a place where racial distinctions did not fall on a simple Black-­white binary. In at least one case, education officials claimed that a student population that was half Black and half Puerto Rican qualified as an integrated school. Despite bad-­faith examples such as this one, education officials in New York City undeniably faced complex questions of what constitutes meaningful integration and how to enhance it in an intensely multiracial and multiethnic system with immense socioeconomic diversity. Moreover, the sheer size of the nation’s largest school system made wide-­ ranging integration initiatives more difficult than in smaller locales. The vastness of the system also provided some semblance of opportunity, as with proposals to construct an array of enormous educational parks serving students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and academic abilities. Among the hurdles were the costs of creating these complexes, particularly during a period when the city’s fiscal problems began to escalate.

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Another important characteristic is that New Yorkers saw their city as more enlightened, more cosmopolitan, and more progressive than other urban centers. This outlook meant that the Board of Ed felt obligated to support integration in principle while making a plausible argument that it was acting to increase integration in practice. New York City, then, is a revealing case study of how Northern racial liberalism intersected with attempts to manage racial inequality. At times this took the form of public officials and everyday New Yorkers supporting campaigns against racial violence and oppression in the South while ignoring racial inequality at home. In 1964, local integration activist Reverend Milton Galamison observed: “People who have given generously to movements in the South . . . have not supported this confrontation that we have waged here in the City of New York.”31 As was the case in Detroit, “white liberals often consciously rejected models for instituting racial equality that they believed would redistribute resources away from whites.” While a number of these individuals were members of moderate organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), “white liberals publicly rejected ideas as politically implausible that they privately deemed undesirable.”32 Black New Yorkers expressed a divergent range of perspectives on life in the Big Apple. In 1956, the New York Post launched an eleven-­part series on Jim Crow in New York, assigning eight reporters to work full-­time for six weeks on it. Ted Poston, the first Black reporter to secure a reporting position at a “mainstream” (aka white) daily newspaper, led the effort.33 Part III of the series encapsulates Poston’s ambivalent take on life as a Black New Yorker. It begins: Let’s stop kidding ourselves about Jim Crow in New York. He lives here, too. We have herded most of our 850,000 Negro citizens into ghettoes which would shame even some Southern towns. We send thousands of Negro children to segregated schools under the very conditions which the Supreme Court said “generate a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” We confine some Negroes to the lowest-­paid jobs in some industries, bar them from some others and hold them back in still others. Beyond that, a Negro here is a little more likely to get pushed around by a cop than is his fellow white citizen, and there aren’t many adult Negroes who at some time or another have not suffered humiliation, deprivation, inconvenience or discourtesy solely because of the color of their skin.

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But don’t let Alabama and the rest of the South fool themselves either. New York City is still the best place in America for a Negro to live.34

Poston surveyed the views of Black New Yorkers, prominent and not. An unnamed Black New Yorker and race relations expert—­“and what Negro in America isn’t a bit of an expert on that question,” Poston comments—­offered this take: “You might say it is the greatest city for Negroes because it is the least American of all the American cities. Somehow, despite the existing prejudices, there are not the sharp divisions, the provincialism, the daily inter-­racial tensions which mark most other American cities, especially those in the South.”35 After relaying several other upbeat assessments from “successful men,” Poston turned to everyday Black New Yorkers, none of whom seriously contemplated a return to their Southern roots. “I’d rather be a lamp post in Harlem than mayor of Brunswick, Ga.,” one truck driver offered. At the same time, people could not ignore the daily constraints they faced; some people in “the slums” conveyed “bitterness and hatred.” One Black worker, whose income had doubled over the last decade, rued that “we missed two wonderful opportunities in those two Harlem riots” in 1935 and 1943. If we had “burned the whole damned place down to the ground then . . . they’d have to let us live somewhere else. . . . Yes, I know there might have been great loss of life if such a thing had happened. But would we have lost more lives than we’ve lost in the 20 years since the first riot through tuberculosis, pestilence, rat bites, tenement fires and our other slow killers?”36 A Black educator criticized a white colleague whose civil rights activism appeared to stop at the city border: He was the first to circulate a local petition in our set on the Emmett Till case. He raised the first collection last December for the Montgomery bus strikers. Yet last summer, when he knew I was fighting with real estate agents all over town to try to find a decent place to move away from the ghetto—­he never once told me of three vacancies in his own apartment house on the East Side. You know, that’s what is wrong with so many of our liberal white friends up here. They’ll fight like hell for your rights as long as they don’t inconvenience their own.37

This pointed criticism was well founded. Education activists could testify to that.

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These struggles over integration in New York City did not occur in a vacuum. Matthew Delmont, Matthew Lassiter, and numerous other scholars have observed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 carved out a safe space for school districts that had not been segregated by law (de jure segregation) but were still substantially segregated in fact (de facto segregation). Districts that did not enshrine racial segregation as official policy were protected from mandated desegregation, unless litigants or federal agencies could prove that school segregation in those locales was caused by deliberate governmental action.38 According to Lassiter, “The so-­ called liberal consensus—­the political coalition that produced the landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation—­depended upon the racial construction of an exceptional South and the widespread public denial of the government policies that shaped housing and school segregation in metropolitan regions throughout the United States.” He contends that “a broad spectrum of white actors,” including many Northern liberals, “seized upon the ‘de facto’ rationale through a ‘color-­ blind’ discourse that defended neighborhood schools and segregated housing as the products of private action and free-­market force alone”—­and thus beyond the rightful purview of government actions to tackle segregation. “As a legal doctrine,” Lassiter says, “‘de facto segregation’ means ‘innocent segregation.’”39 Delmont agrees with Lassiter that political consensus on racial desegregation existed only when it came to the most blatant and vicious manifestations of segregation in the South. To claim, as Lassiter does, that the de jure/de facto distinction is artificial and should be jettisoned does not imply that systems and practices of segregation were uniform throughout the nation. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis assert that “Jim Crow, outside of the South, coexisted, even thrived, alongside efforts to reform its worst manifestations in social and political life. This characteristic distinguished it from its Southern version.” Defenders of Northern segregation “relied upon color-­blind ideology and notions of the North as a meritocracy to explain how and why pervasive inequality in their society mapped, almost perfectly, onto patterns of race and class.” Integration opponents throughout the country would come to embrace these justifications.40 How This Book Unfolds Beginning with the reverberations in New York City from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the book analyzes the Commission on Integration’s proposals to create a more equitable school system and the Board of Education’s

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subsequent refusal to give life to most of its recommendations by using administrative checkpoints. There was fierce white resistance to some board actions, such as the transfer of roughly 350 Black, elementary school students from overcrowded schools in Bedford-­Stuyvesant to underutilized ones in the Queens neighborhoods of Glendale and Ridgewood, about three miles away. Against this backdrop, a citywide school integration movement coalesced, including efforts by educational activists to unite Black and Puerto Rican families in the struggle for integration. Amid such turmoil, the Allen Report on integration was published in 1964 and immediately buried by the board. In the face of turgid inaction, the community control movement emerged in New York City, and Ocean Hill–­Brownsville (OHB) became the most contentious of the three experimental districts approved by the Board of Ed. In contrast to conventional understandings of OHB as a hotbed of anti-­whiteness and anti-­Semitism, these schools were truly a model of interracial cooperation and respect during the fall of 1968, when UFT teachers were on strike in an effort to dismantle community control in OHB. During the community control era of the late 1960s, which has often been depicted as dismissing the possibility—­or even the desirability—­of integration, Black families eschewed numerical student integration to push for changes to other aspects of the school environment. These elements included having a sizable proportion of teachers and administrators who looked like their students, shared some of their experiences, and genuinely respected and cared for them; ample resources that the community had some voice in allocating; and a culturally responsive curriculum. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, questions of segregation were pervasive in the political rhetoric, and New Yorkers’ responses to such campaigns suggested a mounting fatigue. By the mid-­1970s, a federal investigation of the New York City school system found clear-­cut racial discrimination against teachers and students alike, driven by unjustifiable meritocratic checkpoints. For those who continued to believe that school integration was essential to racial justice, causes for optimism were troublingly scarce. From the fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the early 2010s, school integration was not on the educational agenda in New York City. Now that it is back on, we turn, in the last chapters, to contemporary educational activists and their conception of integration for the twenty-­first century. They demand the dismantling of school

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segregation by race and class to the greatest extent possible but spurn the outdated notion that schools with few (or no) white students cannot be successful. Today’s activists insist on an end to admissions screening, which is a key driver of racial and economic segregation in schools and the clearest exemplar of the meritocratic checkpoint. The long-­term impacts of the COVID-­19 pandemic on the drive for integration and equity in the New York City educational system are unclear. Distance learning has exposed many of the inequities baked into the NYC school system. Moreover, admissions screening for the 2021–­22 school year lacked some key data, such as standardized test scores and letter grades for middle school students in spring 2020. In response, the DOE dropped screening for middle school admissions while keeping high school admissions screening mostly in place. There has been no indication thus far whether unscreening at the middle school level represents a first step toward a permanent abandonment of screens at all levels, a one-­time work-­around, or something in between. The mayoral successor to Bill de Blasio, who leaves office at the end of 2021, and their appointee for schools chancellor will steer the new era of public education in New York City.41 In these pages, I seek to offer readers a deeper understanding of why school integration failed in the nearly seven decades between Brown v. Board and the present. The next chapter evaluates the amplification of New York City’s school integration movement in the years following Brown and the means by which the city’s Board of Ed parried these demands.

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on New York City’s school integration efforts, Schools Superintendent John Theobald wrote: “When, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its historic decision outlawing school segregation, most of us in the school system looked upon it as a legal and moral affirmation of our fundamental educational principles. The decision did not, of course, apply to us, since segregation had been illegal in the public schools of New York State since 1900.” At the same time, school officials emphasized the importance of NYC’s educational efforts far beyond city limits: “It is no exaggeration to say that what we do in New York City to meet these challenges may well serve as the pattern for educational enterprise in other cities and throughout the entire country.”1 The New York psychologist Kenneth Clark knew that the board’s profession of racial innocence was a harmful illusion. His research and testimony in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had proven vital to the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the plaintiffs’ argument that legally segregated school systems should be dismantled. Clark admitted to being “very, very happy” when he received news of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision: “I would have to be a block of ice not to be, and we celebrated for quite awhile.”2 The Supreme Court ruling was groundbreaking, but Clark and scores of others would learn over the coming decades that their fight to implement and sustain school integration—­whether in a Georgia town of three hundred or the biggest city in the United States—­would result in sporadic and temporary wins, many crushing losses, and diminishing faith that they would ultimately prevail. It would often seem to them that school officials, white parents, and teachers unions had no burning desire to solve the educational issues facing Black (and Puerto Rican) children, particularly if the solutions required any sacrifices by these stakeholders. Over the next two decades, integration advocates in New IN A 1 96 0 PRO G RE SS RE PO RT

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York City would contest the array of border checkpoints that the Board of Ed and some local school officials had established to minimize integration. Their successes were few. Separating Black children on account of their race, the court stated in Brown, “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”3 The research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, collaborators and spouses, was the first the court cited to support its assertion about segregation’s adverse psychological effects. In the decades since Brown, the logic of the Clarks’ “doll” research has withstood some criticism. When presented with Black and white dolls and asked which one looked like them, Southern Black children readily identified with the Black doll, while Northern Black children were more likely to reject the Black doll with “open demonstrations of intense emotions.” This finding would seem to indicate that Black children in integrated schools struggled more with their self-­conceptions than did Black children in segregated schools. In Kenneth Clark’s view, however, the response of the Southern children suggested that they accepted their subordinate social status, which was an “adjustment to social pathology” and thus unhealthy, whereas the Northern children grappled painfully with this social reality. Though the “doll test” is the best-­known aspect of the Clarks’ involvement in the case, it was not the centerpiece of Kenneth’s testimony or the “Social Science Statement,” which he coordinated and which provided the court with a summary of psychological research on segregation’s adverse effects.4 If the justices harbored doubts about Clark’s findings, the decision made no mention of any misgivings. In the first three state trials in the Brown case—­in South Carolina, Kansas, and Delaware—­the defendants presented no expert witnesses to rebut assertions by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had initiated the litigation, about the psychological damages of segregation. The attorneys for the defendants in Prince Edward County, Virginia, had decided to do so, but they had difficulty finding an expert willing to testify in support of segregation. Attorney Archibald Robertson claimed to have spoken to “more than a hundred sociologists, psychologists, historians, and so forth,” but he said most declined because their colleagues would disapprove of their views, putting their careers in jeopardy. The Virginia attorneys finally found their man in New York City: he was Henry Garrett, a nearly thirty-­year veteran of Columbia University’s Psychology

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Department and former president of the American Psychological Association. Garrett was a native of Virginia’s Halifax County, around an hour’s drive from Prince Edward. He was convinced that Black people were genetically inferior to whites and was willing to testify that, as long as equal facilities were provided, “segregation was in the best interests of both races at the time.” Garrett had taught Kenneth and Mamie Clark and had been Mamie’s thesis advisor while the couple was pursuing their doctorates at Columbia. Garrett recalled Kenneth Clark as being “none too bright,” while Clark remembered Garrett as “a model of mediocrity” when teaching statistics. The outcome of the Prince Edward case, decided by a panel of three federal judges, was never in doubt, so the impact of Garrett’s testimony is difficult to assess. “We have found no hurt or harm to either race” from school segregation, the district court opinion stated on March 7, 1952. The Prince Edward case, along with cases from three other states and the District of Columbia, would advance to the Supreme Court later that year.5 Kenneth Clark did not wait for the May 17, 1954, decision to set his sights on school segregation much closer to his childhood home of Harlem, where he still worked as a faculty member at the City College of New York (starting in 1942) and as co-­founder (with Mamie Clark) of the Northside Center for Child Development. Mamie Clark served as the Northside director but was more comfortable working behind the scenes; Kenneth Clark, who spent less time at Northside due to his competing responsibilities at CCNY, was often the public face of the organization.6 During Clark’s Brown testimony, one opposing attorney questioned why the psychologist was so concerned about Southern segregation when schools in his city exhibited the same racial isolation of students. In February 1954, Clark faced this challenge in a Harlem speech before the New York Urban League, calling on the city’s political leaders to admit their role in perpetuating a segregated school system and calling on the Board of Education to launch a study of segregation in Harlem schools. Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., who had attended the speech, asked Schools Superintendent William Jansen whether Clark’s contentions had any merit; Jansen rejected the accusation, arguing that school segregation merely reflected patterns of segregated housing, which school officials had no authority to address.7 Jansen told the Amsterdam News that he was pleased by the May 17 Brown v. Board of Education decision but claimed that school segregation in New York City was “natural” or “accidental,” opining that racial isolation had “no effects”

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on children “if it is not purposeful segregation.” He went on to assert that New York City actually “discriminated in favor of Negro boys and girls” by allowing them to attend “any high school in the city” and that the quality of Harlem’s teaching staff had no match elsewhere in the city.8 Regarding the former statement, Jansen was evidently referring to students in Harlem, where the only academic high school (for girls only) was slated to close that fall; as a result, students could choose a high school outside their attendance zone since none existed within their zones. The latter statement lacked all credibility, as the New York Teacher News pointed out. Harlem had long had a disproportionate number of substitute and newly hired teachers in its schools, and many in the latter category failed to report to their assigned schools after being hired. Jansen’s claims, Clark retorted, had “no basis in fact.”9 With his neat, closely trimmed hair and moustache, large eyes that peered through glasses, ever-­present tie, and a cigarette often in hand, Clark looked the part of the scholar-­intellectual. Though never a stirring speaker, Clark was forthright in private meetings with power brokers. Along with the civil rights lawyers who achieved important, if incomplete, victories in the courtroom, Clark was part of the first wave of credentialed African Americans who gained some influence in the halls of power. Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1914 to Jamaican parents, Clark had moved with his mother and sister to Harlem when he was four years old. His father had refused to join them, failing to understand why his wife would expose them to a humiliating life “in a strange, racist country,” Clark remembered.10 He had attended integrated schools in Harlem, and later recalled several excellent teachers who had high expectations for students, regardless of background. There were, of course, racial slights as well, such as a white student being named the high school’s most outstanding economics student, though Clark had been the obvious choice. While an undergraduate at Howard University, he met his future wife, Mamie Phipps. The couple would go on to become the first two Black students awarded PhDs in psychology by Columbia University. After a brief stint at Hampton University, serving as Gunnar Myrdal’s chief research assistant on the seminal An American Dilemma, and working in the Office of War Information, Clark accepted a position as assistant professor at City College, where he remained on the faculty until 1975.11 Remarkably, the Clarks passed through the numerous checkpoints where most African Americans were apprehended. The small

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number of checkpoint-­crossers lent a semblance of legitimacy to New York’s nominally integrated school system. In 1946, the Clarks launched the Northside Testing and Consultation Center—­later the Northside Center for Child Development—­serving the population in Harlem and other neighborhoods of northern Manhattan. The racially diverse staff of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers sought to serve a racially and economically integrated clientele. Over the years, it became clear to the staff that traditional, one-­on-­one sessions between therapists and patients, focusing on individual adjustments to one’s personal situation, were insufficient. If “we tried to get individual parents and their children to adjust to schools so criminally inferior that they were dehumanizing,” then the staff was not being helpful, Kenneth Clark concluded. As Mamie Clark observed pointedly, “The families we were working with were not going to respond to umpteen years of lying on a couch and talking about ego and id. They needed help with housing, welfare, health, money, and all those things.”12 Accordingly, the Northside staff sought to give their clients the ability to confront the inequality they faced. For example, the school system had classified many low-­income children as “intellectually retarded.” The staff tested the students, finding that many of them did not deserve that label. Clients and staff protested to educational authorities and got many children shifted into “regular” classes, a rare victory that repaired unfair, purportedly meritocratic checkpoints. Educational services would become a key component of the Northside Center.13 Even as the clinic expanded in the 1950s, the Clarks realized that, for all its contributions, it lacked the power to transform Harlem in the absence of expansive public policy efforts to repair failing schools, substandard housing, and so on. As Daniel Matlin explains, “Every child [whom the clinicians] were able to help at Northside represented at least one thousand whom they couldn’t help.”14 Private or voluntary efforts alone were no cure for the persistent problems of school segregation and educational inequality; government intervention was crucial. Such actions might include federal funding cutoffs to segregated school systems (after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act), as well as state and local initiatives to dismantle school segregation and rectify funding disparities between districts and between schools. One of the Clarks’ key allies in the school integration fight was Ella Baker. In 1952, after serving as the national NAACP’s director of branches, Baker became

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the first female president of the organization’s New York City branch. “After traveling around the country for two decades aiding grassroots groups to develop activist campaigns for change,” her biographer Barbara Ransby writes, “she now had an opportunity to shape and direct such a movement in the heart of New York City.”15 The heart of Black New York was in Harlem, so Baker moved the branch office there from its downtown location. In the two years preceding the Brown decision, the NYC branch brought an array of organizations together to address school desegregation and reform as well as police brutality. Baker utilized the full menu of “protest tactics she had taught others to utilize: sending public letters of protest, leading noisy street demonstrations, confronting the mayor in front of the news media, and even running for public office, after temporarily taking off her NAACP hat.”16 Baker had a gift for bringing people of varied backgrounds and political persuasions together to search for solutions to persistent social problems. Working with Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Baker pressed not only for integration, but increased involvement of parents in establishing priorities and creating curricula for their children. In summer 1952 and again in early 1953, Baker organized meetings at the Clarks’ suburban home so that activists, educators, and policymakers could plot a roadmap to change once the Supreme Court struck down school segregation.17 Demanding Action after Brown In April 1954, Kenneth Clark arranged a conference at the Northside Center on school segregation in New York City. The “Children Apart” conference drew more than two hundred individuals representing sixty schools, social welfare agencies, unions, religious organizations, parent groups, and Harlem community groups. Among the attendees were representatives from the Anti-­Defamation League, the government of Puerto Rico’s Labor Migration Division, Mills College of Education, the NAACP, the NYC Parks Department, the New York Public Library, the Public Education Association, and the Urban League. Baker’s role was key here as well: her contributions to the conference included arranging speakers, writing conference materials, and meeting with participating groups.18 Reviewing the testimony of social psychologists in the Supreme Court case, Clark said that when minority-­group children discover their inferior status, “they react with feelings of inferiority and a sense of personal humiliation. They become confused about their own personal worth.” Lower-­income children may

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respond to racial oppression with “aggressions and hostility” against the dominant group or their own racial group, while children from middle-­and higher-­ income homes may become “withdrawn and submissive.” Minority children from all backgrounds often adopt a “defeatist attitude” and lower their “personal ambitions” when attending segregated schools. The effects of segregation on white children, Clark conceded, “are somewhat more obscure.” They may, however, exhibit “confusion, conflict, moral cynicism, and disrespect for authority” when witnessing the principles of brotherhood, justice, and fairness being violated by the people and institutions that espouse these notions.19 Clark’s speech also traced the historical roots of Black inequality in New York City. He noted that in 1900, the state had repealed its law permitting racially separate schools and that most Black New Yorkers had attended racially mixed schools in the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, with residential segregation intensifying and ghetto populations increasing in density, school segregation thickened and educational standards deteriorated. In 1935, the Mayor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlem had studied the uprising that had occurred earlier that year, sparked by alleged police brutality against a sixteen-­year-­old Black youth; the rumors had later proved to be false, though they were fueled by real and persistent police abuse of Black citizens. During the riot, a different sixteen-­year-­old had been killed by police with no justification. Fifty-­seven civilians and seven police officers had been injured.20 The commission report described Black Harlemites’ frustrations with decaying, overcrowded schools and apathetic, racist teachers. Though physical conditions in the schools had improved somewhat in the two decades after the report, not much else had. Whereas Columbia University’s Otto Klineberg found in the 1930s that Southern-­born Black migrants to NYC showed substantial improvements in test scores after some time in the city, more recent indications (based on more limited data) were that Black migrants from the South or the West Indies experienced declines in learning as they spent more years in city schools. In some Harlem schools, students showed zero improvement in test scores from the beginning of the school year to the end; in effect, they learned “practically nothing” from September to June. Clark and his colleagues found that Harlem schools had 103 classes for “retarded” children, compared to six for “gifted” children.

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Lowered expectations for Black children created a self-­perpetuating cycle in which they did not simply feel inadequately prepared to advance in their education, but their skills in fact became inferior. The failure to prepare Black children for academic and other specialized high schools had become “a most effective form of racial exclusion,” a meritocratic, formally colorblind checkpoint. While schools were not the sole factor in explaining segregation and racial achievement gaps, education officials needed to take responsibility in attempting to assure high-­quality, integrated education, Clark asserted.21 The same course correction was also required of many principals and teachers, who often blamed Harlem students for poor school attitudes; one Harlem principal insisted that his students had no desire for education, as they were “interested in pool halls and cars.”22 If teachers and staff expected little of Harlem youth, their chances of passing the meritocratic checkpoint to a well-­resourced, quality school were low. In the wake of the “Children Apart” conference, the Intergroup Committee of New York’s Public Schools was founded, with Clark as chair and Baker on the steering committee, to convince the Board of Ed to desegregate citywide and upgrade Harlem schools. The interracial committee comprised twenty-­eight “social, welfare, civic, labor, and religious organizations.”23 On June 21, 1954, just over a month after the Brown decision, Clark continued his assault on school segregation in a speech before the Urban League of Greater New York. Now that school segregation had been struck down, Clark said, “there is no more justification—­moral, legal or otherwise—­for segregated schools in New York City than there is for segregated schools in Summerton, South Carolina. Northern officials cannot afford to be either complacent or self-­righteous with this issue,” nor can they evade culpability by attributing Northern segregation to “natural causes” while condemning segregation in Dixie.24 In July 1954, Clark wrote to Board President Arthur Levitt with appreciation for the board’s agreement to have the Public Education Association examine the problem of segregation in city schools. Levitt had attended the Urban League symposium, disputing a number of Clark’s assertions. He subsequently decided that an outside organization should evaluate accusations of school segregation in NYC and correct any false impressions. In his letter, Clark objected to statements Levitt had made in earlier correspondence with another individual; Levitt had shared that letter with Clark. Specifically, Clark took issue with Levitt’s “emphatic repudiation and rejection of the term Jim-­Crow, applied by Dr. Clark to our New

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York City schools.” Because the term implied segregation that is intentionally perpetuated, Levitt lamented “the utter unfairness of this foul epithet.” Clark denied having used the term in the New York City context, blaming the New York Post for erroneous attribution. The psychologist did draw Levitt’s attention to two elementary schools near 160th Street in Manhattan—­one virtually all Black (PS 46), the other predominantly white (PS 169)—­in which the board provided bus transportation for white children to attend the “white” school eighteen blocks away rather than the walkable PS 46. According to Clark, the former principal of PS 46 had encouraged and helped white parents to transfer their children to PS 169. Later, school district lines were redrawn to ensure segregation—­quite intentionally. What initially had been a VIP line for white children to exit morphed into a standard physical checkpoint. This was not the only case of racial gerrymandering in New York City schools, Clark added.25 Looking forward, he emphasized the Board of Ed’s “historic opportunity now to set an example for the nation. This would confound those—­such as [South Carolina governor James F.] Byrnes—­who announced they would send representatives to New York [and several other Northern cities] in order to learn how segregated schools can be maintained within the law.”26 The Preferred Approach to Integration New York City schools were not uniformly segregated. Schools with some degree of integration, especially in the higher grades, were not uncommon. In integrated neighborhoods, schools were typically integrated, at least statistically, though some white parents used back channels to have their children placed in schools for which they were not zoned. In segregated neighborhoods, schools were segregated. A 1954 promotional film by the Board of Education aptly captured its preferred approach to school integration: extol its virtues without twisting arms to ensure that it occurs in practice. Entitled Let Us Break Bread Together, the film glowingly depicts a school inter-­visitation program in Manhattan that matched seven predominantly Black schools with seven predominantly white ones. Parents and children would take part in social activities to help create bonds across the color line. Early in the film’s predictable arc, parents express doubts about the initiative. “I believe everyone is all right,” a white woman avers, but she wonders, “What about the social implications of all this mixing children together?” A Black woman ponders, “Why should I make my child believe that he is going to

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be accepted, when I know that when he grows up he’s going to be hurt? I might as well spare his feelings by letting him live with his own now.” Children were assigned pen pals from their paired school, then delighted in a find-­your-­pen-­pal event. One group studied UNICEF and visited the United Nations. Another studied folk dancing, with a Scottish child demonstrating a sword dance, and a Black student, tap dancing. The two then dance together, ring-­around-­the-­rosy style, with evident delight. Near the film’s end, the white woman featured earlier returns to confess that initially she had serious doubts: “I thought it would be dangerous, or at best all talk.” But after her daughter had taken part, she and her husband were thankful for this “spiritual adventure”: “It has brought our family closer to the grandeur of God, through learning to know the heights to which all men can rise, whatever their nationality, color, or creed, so long as they have sympathetic encouragement to achieve the best that is in them.”27 The appeal of such a program to school officials is not hard to decipher. It involved little cost and essentially no sacrifice to anyone involved; it was politically uncontentious; and it helped people to feel they were “doing their part” as cosmopolitan, open-­minded New Yorkers. Though arguably good public relations, it did nothing to address deeply rooted educational inequality. The Commission on Integration In December 1954, the board announced its intention to appoint a commission on integration tasked with making recommendations to increase school integration.28 The Board of Education finally seemed poised to face New York City’s own school segregation problem. However, education activists would soon learn in this and subsequent instances that studies of educational issues rarely translated to prompt and serious action. In the years to come, the board would erect numerous administrative checkpoints to prevent the implementation of pro-­integration policies, accruing far more justifications for inaction than evidence of decisive steps to bring about integration. Eleven months later, the Public Education Association (PEA) released its report, undertaken at the request of the Board of Ed, entitled, “The Status of Public School Education of Negro and Puerto Rican Children in New York City.” Its evaluation of the board’s action and inaction regarding segregation was less than damning, with the New York Times concluding in a headline: “City Schools Cleared in Segregation Study.” PEA found forty-­two elementary schools with

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enrollments that were at least 90 percent Black and Puerto Rican, and nine junior high schools that were at least 85 percent Black and Puerto Rican. These schools represented around 8 percent of the elementary schools and junior highs in the city. If one included schools that were at least 90 percent “other” (overwhelmingly white), 71 percent of city schools at the elementary and junior high levels qualified as segregated. While commenting that the degree of racial separation “is a state of affairs which we should all deplore,” PEA contended that the blame “cannot be placed at the doormat” of the board. Numerous conditions, most prominently residential segregation, caused the separation in schools, “but in the strict legal sense of the word there is no such thing as segregation in the school system of New York City,” PEA said. Compared to predominantly white schools, students in the segregated schools were housed in older buildings that more often needed maintenance and had fewer experienced teachers. PEA found no evidence that the board had drawn school attendance zones for segregation, though others, including Clark, could provide multiple examples of this practice.29 The Commission on Integration (CI) was now asked to tackle the more difficult aspect of the problem: solving it. The commission had been launched in May 1955, in advance of the PEA report. Its thirty-­seven members included all nine board members and five board staffers; the remainder were “civic and educational leaders,” including Clark and Baker. In July 1956, the two co-­chairs of the commission—­state controller and former Board of Ed president Arthur Levitt and current board president Charles Silver—­spoke confidently about the future of school integration in the city. Silver promised that New York City schools “will demonstrate in their program of integration that the spirit of [Brown v. Board of Education] will be carried forward in the classroom.”30 Sub-­commissions examined six areas: zoning; teacher assignments and personnel; community relations and information; guidance, educational stimulation, and placement; physical plant and maintenance; and educational standards and curriculum. Clark chaired the last subcommittee; Ella Baker was a member of the zoning panel. Over three years, the board held hearings on the sub-­commission reports, accepted some of the recommendations, and approved additional policy resolutions. The zoning and teacher assignment proposals were the most contentious and, not coincidentally, the last to be submitted to the board. The former recommended the creation of a central zoning unit to spearhead a comprehensive zoning plan aimed at achieving maximum integration and

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proposed that school construction be concentrated in “fringe” areas between predominantly white and predominantly Black neighborhoods. The zoning unit was created in 1957 but was accorded no power to implement the CI’s recommendations; district superintendents would continue to be in charge of zoning decisions. “Permissive zoning,” in which parents could voluntarily transfer their children from segregated neighborhood schools to underutilized ones (typically majority white), was rolled out in a manner that almost seemed intended to prompt acquiescence to segregation. Busing thirteen Black students from Bedford-­Stuyvesant to Coney Island, a round trip that took two to three hours every day, was no way to make the case for integration. By 1959, the board’s intent to utilize an administrative checkpoint to mothball the CI’s recommendations was unmistakable.31 Board actions often conflicted with its stated policy of encouraging integration. David Rogers’s classic study of the board describes its standard routine in brief, devastating fashion: “New schools would first be placed badly for desegregation, away from fringe areas. Then the board would zone for segregation, and when civil rights groups and their allies protested, the board would try unworkable compromises that often discredited the whole desegregation concept.” Gerrymandering school zones for segregation, a physical checkpoint, was still not uncommon.32 Superintendent Jansen did not have many fans among members of civil rights groups. Describing Jansen’s stalling tactics with respect to integration, one civic leader explained: “He could always prove that under certain circumstances Negro parents were clamoring for their own schools [in their segregated neighborhoods] and not for any new concepts of zoning. He would deny that a situation existed in the first place and then present expert opinion that nothing could be done about it in the second place.”33 Board Double-­Talk and Media Distortions JHS 258, a long, low-­slung building with a light brick exterior, located at Halsey Street and Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bedford-­Stuyvesant neighborhood, opened its doors in September 1955 with an all-­Black student body, three blocks from the all-­Black JHS 35. Board President Charles Silver admitted the obvious in a July 1956 letter to local integration activist Milton Galamison: JHS 258 was segregated. However, he promised that the city would “put a considerable amount of extra service into [JHS] 258 because we want it to be a fine school—­even

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a model school.” US Senator Jacob Javits pointed the finger at Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. for segregation at JHS 258, asserting that this “will still be a Jim-­Crow school [that]. . . . will suit even Jim Eastland [the arch segregationist senator from Mississippi]—­a model of complete and absolute segregation declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the land.”34 School officials attempted to walk a thin line between asserting the urgency of integration and denying that the changes proposed by the Commission on Integration would result in severe disruptions of the school system, particularly for families who wondered whether they should join the white exodus to the suburbs. Reverend Galamison stood firmly in his belief that the board’s attempt at tightrope walking should not disguise the urgency of addressing the poor education that so many Black children in New York City received. Galamison, pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church, less than a quarter mile from JHS 258, had become active in the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP and its fight for school integration. He had been recruited by Winston Craig and Annie Stein, a white radical who, along with her husband, Arthur, had been involved in leftist causes since the 1930s. Stein and Craig, the chair of the branch’s education committee, had become frustrated in their efforts to catalyze member activism, and they thought the pastor could aid that effort. Galamison and Craig became co-­chairs of the education committee in December 1955.35 A November 2, 1956, story in the New York Times recounted the Brooklyn NAACP’s frustration with the board’s claim that it had made progress in its plan to integrate JHS 258 and other schools in Bedford-­Stuyvesant. Galamison deemed Superintendent Jansen’s comments on the matter to be “inadequate, misleading and an attempt to evade your responsibility to integrate” JHS 258. The school had become a flashpoint in the fight for integration. In an open letter to Jansen, Galamison charged that the board had exaggerated its timid attempts to foster integration: “There are at present more than 20,000 children” in Bed-­Stuy and nearby areas “attending seventeen segregated schools.” The board’s proposals would at best affect “a negligible minority” of these students, the minister charged.36 Jansen said his hands were tied. Given that the school was located “well within the somewhat indefinite and changing boundaries of a large Negro area” and that the school was filled to capacity, “no satisfactory solution is available at the moment,” Jansen explained. However, he said, when the nearby JHS 61 opened

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as an integrated school, the redrawing of school boundary lines might permit the integration process to begin. In a telling non sequitur, Jansen explained to the Brooklyn minister that integration “requires that we provide special services, in so far as we can within our budgetary limitations, to those schools in which there are many pupils with special problems.”37 The implication was that the city need provide special services to schools serving students with “special problems” only when there were white children attending them. The Times reported that board officials worried about the potential of violence by white parents if their children were assigned to 258. This insinuation outraged Kenneth Clark, who expressed his disbelief to Jansen that board members “could seriously entertain the notion” that New Yorkers would meet school desegregation with violence. “If such violence is possible,” he continued, “then New York City can no longer claim to be the foremost example of American democracy in the nation.” Instead, it would be virtually indistinguishable from Clinton, Tennessee, or Clay, Kentucky, two towns in the Border South that had exploded in the wake of school desegregation efforts. “This I cannot believe,” Clark said, arguing that any anticipation of violence, whether real or imagined, was no justification for inaction.38 Some national civil rights organizations worried that the push for school integration in the North would provide tools for Southern obstructionists. Roy Wilkins, the NYC-­based executive secretary of the national NAACP, feared that flexible zoning arrangements to integrate Brooklyn schools such as JHS 258 might be refashioned as a rationale for Southern locales to evade desegregation by adopting such plans as “freedom of choice,” which put the onus on Black students to apply for a transfer to white schools. They were often discouraged, whether subtly or overtly, from doing so. “I am greatly concerned that we do not press a northern program which will have the effect of stymying beginnings in the South,” Wilkins said. “I may be wrong, but I believe the chief task is getting the southern program underway. We must not cease activity in the North, but we must push the program in such a way that it does not embarrass the southern effort.”39 He told June Shagaloff, who headed the NAACP’s Northern desegregation efforts, that he had gathered dozens of clippings from Southern newspapers “gleefully detailing” the Brooklyn branch’s efforts to desegregate JHS 258. “Ill-­ considered actions and arbitrary demands could well throw a monkey wrench

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into the southern effort,” he said, adding sternly that dismantling segregation for two million Black youths in the South was “infinitely more important than the desegregation of one school in Brooklyn, N.Y.” Also, somewhat surprisingly, Wilkins admitted to “the strong feeling (which is almost heresy in the present age of hysteria) that all of the blame for inferior schooling cannot be placed on segregation,” though much of it rightfully could be. Because racial inequality also stemmed from such factors as job and residential discrimination and “cultural deprivation,” “we must acknowledge . . . that mere desegregation will not correct all conditions automatically. Unless our people are geared to something more than protest and denunciation, we will be leading them falsely.”40 Concerned that the national NAACP, which was based in New York City, would advise caution and eschew direct action, Ella Baker created Parents in Action against Educational Discrimination. The group’s members were mainly Black and Puerto Rican parents who demanded both integration and greater parent voice in educational policy. In September 1957, under the auspices of Parents in Action, over five hundred Black and Puerto Rican parents picketed City Hall, exasperated with New York’s failure to address their legitimate complaints about issues that included overpacked schools and fewer experienced teachers in Black and Puerto Rican schools, biased curriculum, and glaring racial segregation. That day, Baker confronted a reluctant Mayor Wagner to demand answers on “what is, or is not, going to be done for our children.”41 While Wagner ultimately did little to change the school system, Baker’s efforts in the 1950s became important precursors to future educational activism. The calls by Baker and her fellow freedom fighters for not only integration but enhanced parental and community input into schools planted seeds for the community-­control movement of the late 1960s. Moreover, Baker’s role in building coalitions of Black and Puerto Rican parents and communities would prove crucial to the integration and community-­ control movements.42 Meanwhile, Commission on Integration members and supporters grew irritated at several media accounts that severely distorted the panel’s authority, which was strictly advisory, and its recommendations. A particularly egregious example was published in the January 29, 1957, edition of the Wall Street Journal. The existing “enforced mass migration of school children”—­citing a case of two hundred students being bused twenty blocks—­was only the tip of the iceberg, part of a “master plan” to integrate the city’s 925,000 public school kids, the

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conservative paper charged. If the board decided to implement the CI’s zoning plan, the paper predicted that the following September would bring massive busing to dismantle the neighborhood school system. This was far from the truth. Given its track record, the board was extremely unlikely to detonate such “political dynamite,” as one high-­ranking school official put it. One principal of a recently integrated Brooklyn school complained that “we’re being stampeded into a dubious program,” since it was evident that white families withdrew from public schools “when Negroes are brought in from outside.” Others reiterated the charge that violence by whites was possible if the integration issue was pressed.43 In April, Jansen assured an audience in Jamaica, Queens, that neither long-­ distance busing nor mandatory teacher transfers would be implemented. Rumors of extensive busing “are completely false,” he said. “No responsible person has the right to make such a statement. No such action is planned.” He pledged that the neighborhood school would remain intact, conceding that areas of concentrated Black population would continue to have segregated schools. Breakdown of segregated housing patterns would be key to school desegregation, he remarked. With regard to teacher assignment, Jansen voiced the hope that “a considerable number” of teachers would volunteer to teach in “difficult” schools, and that many student teachers and substitutes who were teaching in these schools would opt to teach in them when they became eligible for appointment to the full-­time teaching staff.44 Yet again, it appeared that the serious educational issues that Black and Puerto Rican children faced were far less pressing than the public relations issues that had to be massaged. Members of the CI were infuriated with an article by Agnes E. Meyer, a philanthropist and writer on education and other issues, that included numerous distortions of fact. The article begins with Meyer recounting a conversation, just after World War II, with faculty members at a Black university. When one confessed that Pearl Harbor brought him joy from seeing that “a colored race had clobbered the white man,” Meyer retorted that “Americans have done more for the Negro than any other nation on the face of the globe”; despite some “failures and injustices,” the treatment of African Americans “constitutes not an indictment but one of the greatest achievements of a democratic nation.”45 Meyer did not report their responses, but one might guess that the faculty members raised their eyebrows (if not rolled their eyes) at her interpretation of American history.

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The CI’s call to rethink the examination used to determine admissions for the city’s renowned specialized high schools—­still a contentious issue in present-­day New York City—­led Meyer to conclude that “educational standards are of no concern” to the panel. Regarding proposals to assure that students in “ghetto” schools have access to the same percentage of experienced teachers as students in other schools—­something that was far from true under existing conditions—­ Meyer claimed that mandatory rotation of teachers would give “every principal the means for ridding himself of any teacher he happens to dislike.” The rationale for this conclusion remained mysterious. Indeed, Meyer compounded this groundless assertion by alleging that, per the Teachers Guild, several principals had already utilized this power to dispatch unwanted teachers. The CI retorted accurately that it held no such powers as an advisory body, and that it was unaware of the TG having made such a statement.46 Meyer’s obtuseness did not end there. “One gets the impression from this report,” she intoned, “that the minority group of white children exists only as pawns to achieve what are called ‘ethnically balanced’ schools.” Harlem schools would be populated by empty desks unless white children from far away filled them.47 Meyer failed to mention that schools in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods were often terribly overcrowded, while many white schools had vacant seats. This was one reason that integration was most often one-­way: Black and Puerto Rican children transported to white schools, not the other way around. The other reason reveals the falsity of her “white children as pawns” assertion: the Board of Ed consistently worked to minimize any integration burden on white families for fear that they would exercise their veto and exit the public school system. The CI dispatched a twenty-­eight-­point rebuttal to Meyer’s claims, but such journalistic irresponsibility surely did not help the CI to succeed in its heavy lift.48 Mixed Feelings The CI’s protracted deliberations brought a wide array of perspectives out into the open. Perhaps most interesting were the views of those individuals who did not fit squarely into the pro-­or anti-­integration camps. One white Bronx father wrote to Board President Charles Silver to share his take. His family resided in a racially transitioning neighborhood where most of his daughter’s classmates were now Puerto Rican and Black. “I would not have her walk even 1 more block merely to get a school with all white classmates,” he explained. However,

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he added, “I’m just as opposed to the idea of re-­zoning to appease strong Negro pressure groups. . . . Sometimes we’re afraid to disagree with Negro viewpoints even on small matters for fear of being labelled as prejudiced. But there are also times when a little courage is in order.”49 Another correspondent, whose race is not altogether clear, begins with a defense of young teachers and substitutes, contending that “the Negro children are doing well considering their ignorant backgrounds. They need better schools and above all, better homes.” She suggests hiring teachers who had been casualties of school desegregation in the South: “They would have their hearts in it, while the resentful white teacher won’t take the slightest interest.” One reason that Black students “don’t do better is because they have too many white teachers who don’t give a darn about them.” Give Southern Black teachers and New York City children “a chance and let’s stop hanging onto the coat tails of white people,” she urges.50 Public feedback also provided a glimpse into the often complex array of emotions that Black New Yorkers felt about integration. A Black accountant and president of the local PTA, G. William Delamar, recounted the divergent experiences of his fifteen-­year-­old son, who attended a predominantly white school, and his thirteen-­year-­old daughter, who attended an entirely Black one. “In a short time,” he observed, “you can see them beginning to differ socially and culturally.” The elder child experienced greater cultural exposure, participated in more school trips, and had access to newer, higher-­quality books, better facilities, more imaginative guidance counselors, and fewer substitutes than did his younger sister. Over half the teachers in the girl’s junior high school were substitutes, “since competent teachers refuse to come or to stay in the school.” On behalf of the PTA of JHS 136 (Manhattan), which his daughter attended, Delamar called for an end to gerrymandered school districts and schools lacking capable teachers: “Now is the time to end the loss to the community of potential leaders. Let’s have no more half-­educated children!”51 The Parents Committee for Better Education, with activist attorney Paul Zuber as its acting chair, made an impassioned plea for improvement of Harlem schools and immediate steps toward complete integration of the public school system. In a letter to Board Chair Charles Silver, Zuber objected to the high numbers of substitute teachers in Harlem schools and to recent indications that new teachers who had barely passed the licensing exam would be sent to

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Harlem in disproportionate numbers that fall. Flipping typical arguments about the rights of white, middle-­class taxpayers, Zuber argued that Harlem’s taxpayers were being cheated by the refusal of many higher-­salaried, experienced teachers to be assigned to Harlem schools. He implied that voluntary teacher transfers to “difficult” schools were a remote possibility, and some other approach must be devised.52 A letter that Zuber had mailed to Mayor Wagner two weeks earlier had delved into considerably more detailed policy suggestions. He repeated the findings of the Public Education Association that predominantly white schools received triple the spending per student of predominantly Black schools and noted that the curriculum at Black schools was clearly inferior to that used in white schools. While acknowledging that residential segregation was an impediment to school integration, Zuber warned that “this is the same excuse that will be used ten years from now” and argued that school integration could be achieved even in the face of housing segregation. Given the history of unequal school funding for Black students, he asserted that the city “owes millions of dollars” to Black and Puerto Rican students “before the ledger can be balanced.”53 Of course, some who weighed in on the integration debate made less precise pleas, calling simply for justice—­however they conceived it. John McNamara of the Bronx asked incredulously, “Do you gentlemen honestly believe you can then ship our children to some slum school . . . to spend their lunch hours in streets that are civic cesspools . . . without a fight on your hands?” Warning that pursuit of the integration plan “will drive out the remainder of New York’s taxpaying middle class,” McNamara “only hope[d] for a complete fiasco, and utter confusion to your misguided plan.”54 Similarly, condemning the integration plan as “unfair and unconstitutional,” a pair of Manhattanites warned: “As soon as Negroes move among whites there are holdups, muggings and fights.” Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, they alleged, “Negroes show their hatred for the Whites openly by abuse, insulting remarks and otherwise. . . . The Americans of the South are right in that the Whites and Negroes should never be mixed.”55 Teacher organizations strongly opposed the rotation of teachers, with the exception of the Teachers Union, which had seen its membership decline during the “Red scares” of the 1950s. The Negro Teachers Association was mostly supportive of the CI’s overall recommendations but suggested that hiring extra teachers would bring more successful outcomes than mandatory teacher rotation.

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(It was hoped that such a move would increase the number of Black teachers, which was very small compared to the number in other large cities.) The organization also suggested that the board consider rotation of supervisors rather than teachers.56 The objections of the High School Teachers Association (HSTA) to both the zoning and teacher assignment provisions were perhaps most revealing. HSTA spokesperson Concetta Roy began her testimony at the public hearing on the proposals by complaining that groups and people involved in high schools—­HSTA, the High School Principals Association, other high school staff, and high school parents—­had not been consulted in the formulation of the reports. (If true, this may have been the case because the CI focused almost exclusively on the elementary and junior high levels.) Because “New York City does not foster segregation” and the state opposes discrimination, any transfer plan would “cause great morale problems,” Roy contended. As for rotation of experienced teachers to “difficult” schools, the HSTA opposed them as “superfluous,” since the Board of Ed had mostly hired “a group of broad-­minded, well-­balanced, fair-­minded and honest men and women who have a sense of duty and a proper attitude toward teaching the child—­not a race, a creed, or a nationality.” Many parents, especially those of children in difficult schools, would reject this characterization. Later in her remarks, Roy insisted that most high school teachers had become “accustomed to working with” minority students and thus “must not be considered biased. . . . Which one of us has not felt he was part of a minority at one time or another?” Revealingly, the HSTA argued against the proposal that teachers seeking promotion to supervisory positions be required to serve for three years in difficult schools: “Most of these candidates who are excellent supervisory material are not fitted by temperament to work in these schools.” This “temporary, forced exile” would only dissuade hundreds of promising individuals from applying.57 The Teachers Alliance (TA) looked back nostalgically to a time when neighborhood schools served distinctly ethnic communities: “There were no so-­called ‘difficult’ schools. Everyone was happy and no one ever mentioned segregation.” Now, the city was proposing to transport children “all over the city.” What would happen to a commuter child who came down with appendicitis or was involved in a severe accident, the TA wondered. Heaven forbid, what about an “atomic attack”? The TA stated that sadly, the commission had become “so engrossed

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with what might be described as a ‘race or color phobia’ that the whole human element has been lost.”58 Similarly, the Cambria Heights Civic Association (Queens) objected to efforts at “ethnic balance.” If segregated schools are a “handicap,” the group argued, “then it has very easily been overcome as evidenced by the great Negro leaders on the scene today,” many of whom were the products of segregated schools in the South.59 May Healy of the Joint Committee of Teacher Organizations defended the “right” of people to live in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods, which were “natural” groupings based on shared customs, religious backgrounds, “liking for particular foods and ease of purchase used in respective national dishes.” If carried out, the CI’s recommendations would likely produce “new hostilities, conflicts, resentments and separations of peoples,” resulting in “an obvious race consciousness that does not now exist.”60 This statement was naïve at best and baldly disingenuous at worst. Integration in Theory Only Rose Shapiro, who had chaired the Public Education Association (PEA) study as well as the CI’s zoning subcommittee, confessed to being “disturbed” by the reactions of teachers, who “should be in the forefront of the fight for more racially balanced schools.” Referring to Healy’s predictions of increased hostility, Shapiro sighed: “How these teachers can expect community support in the future is difficult to imagine.” In a comment echoed by those who called for bold action throughout the decades-­long dispute over segregation and were frustrated by liberal lip service, Shapiro remarked sharply: “I am getting weary of statements that support ‘integration in principle’ and oppose the simplest forms of implementation.”61 Reverend Galamison shared Shapiro’s frustration: “Artificial means have been used here for years to gerrymander school zones and maintain segregation. It’s time we used artificial means to promote integration.” Unlike representatives of the NAACP’s national office, who tended to be more cautious in their criticism of public officials, Galamison did not have a need to court support and financial contributions from white liberals who might blanch at hard-­hitting school desegregation policies in their own backyards. New schools superintendent John Theobald encapsulated the Board of Ed’s “integration in theory, but not in practice” mode of operation: “We’re committed to a policy of integration, but we won’t

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bus pupils from here to there. I believe in neighborhood schools.” Consequently, in highly segregated residential areas, “there is no chance at present of providing an integrated situation.”62 Four years earlier, the Board of Ed had vowed to enact a plan that would “prevent the further development of [segregated] schools and integrate existing ones as quickly as practicable.”63 Now, it seemed, integration was hopelessly unrealistic. Some parents understandably lacked confidence that the board would make good on its promises. On September 8, the opening of the 1958 school year, nine mothers of fifteen Harlem students refused to send their children to three local junior high schools. In addition to being racially segregated, their children’s assigned schools had serious teacher shortages, and teachers recommended fewer than one-­fifth of students for college-­bound academic tracks.64 Mae Mallory was one of the mothers who constituted the Harlem Nine, the number used to echo the Little Rock Nine who desegregated schools in the Arkansas capital city. She did not adhere to the image of female activists on both sides of the integration debate who were expected to be “respectable” wives and mothers unconcerned with broader political debates and simply wanting what was best for their children. Instead, Mallory was “a divorced, working mother of two with established communist and nationalist ties. She was not a member of mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP.” The Board of Ed and the NYPD saw an opening to discredit Mallory, arresting her on charges that, in 1952, she had illegally received welfare payments while employed for six weeks. After her release on bail, she rejoined the fight. Whereas other Harlem Nine mothers endured threats to their families and their husbands’ employment, Mallory asserted that she was shielded from reprisals “since I had no husband or no job.”65 In an effort to prompt the city to defend its actions in court, the Harlem parents and their attorney, Paul Zuber, filed a $1 million lawsuit against Theobald, Mayor Wagner, and the Board of Ed, alleging “a sinister and discriminatory purpose in the perpetuation of racial segregation in five school districts in Harlem.”66 The city took the bait. On October 28, the Board of Education submitted a petition in Domestic Relations Court alleging that Stanley and Bernice Skipwith, parents of a twelve-­year-­old girl, and Charles and Shirley Rector, parents of a twelve-­year-­old boy, had violated the board’s compulsory education law by refusing to enroll their children in their assigned junior high schools or a private school. The parents asserted that the assigned junior highs (JHS 136

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and 139, respectively) offered educational opportunities that were inferior to those offered in predominantly white schools. (Though they had arranged for some private tutoring of their children, they did not use this as a defense.) These unequal educational opportunities, the parents claimed, resulted from racial segregation and discriminatory teacher staffing in the two schools, producing a deficient level of teacher qualification. They argued that the board was responsible in both instances. Consequently, they insisted that children attending the two schools in question were denied equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. The two schools were the only two junior highs in the city (out of 127) that were entirely Black and Puerto Rican, with the former group comprising over 98 percent at both schools. Seven additional schools were over 95 percent Black and Puerto Rican; forty junior highs were at least 95 percent white. The judge in the case, Justine Wise Polier, quoted the Commission on Integration’s assertion that school segregation, whether the result of law or residential segregation, brings “inherent and incurable” deficiencies and that “separate but equal” does not exist.67 At JHS 136, forty-­three of the eighty-­five teachers were substitutes, appointed by the principal rather than the board. A number were not licensed to teach in the subjects they were assigned to. For example, only two of the eleven math teachers were regularly licensed to teach that subject. Such disparities in teaching qualifications occurred throughout the city. In “X” schools (those where 85 percent or more of the students were Black and Puerto Rican), nearly half (49.5 percent) of licensed teaching positions were vacant; in “Y” schools (those where over 85 percent of the students were white), the percentage was under 30. As long as “X” schools had markedly lower proportions of regularly licensed teachers than “Y” schools, Polier stated, “discrimination and inferior education, apart from that inherent in residential patterns, will continue. The Constitution requires equality, not mere palliatives.” The board, Polier continued, was “entirely responsible” for the disparity in teacher assignments since it allowed its employees to “establish the discriminatory pattern.” Would it be acceptable, she pondered, for the police commissioner to allow officers to refuse assignments to undesirable neighborhoods? Polier ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.68 Two weeks earlier, Judge Nathaniel Kaplan had found four Harlem mothers guilty of violating the state’s compulsory education law. The mothers had defiantly stated that they would go to jail rather than send

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their children to their assigned schools. In the end, after Polier’s ruling, Kaplan declined to punish the defendants. To stop these legal battles and allow the students to resume their schooling, Zuber and Schools Superintendent John Theobald agreed that the children of the Harlem Nine parents would attend JHS 43, a Harlem school chosen by Theobald that offered enhanced guidance services and a cultural program. The solution was an interim one, after the children had spent 156 days out of school. In a move that angered the Harlem parents, the board appealed the Skipwith decision. Reverend Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, the sole Black voice on the nine-­member board, accused his colleagues of erasing “the last line of difference between Little Rock and New York.” The appeal was later dropped.69 While the parents could look with pride on some measure of victory, the structures of school segregation remained firmly in place. What Did the Commission Achieve? Toward Greater Opportunity, the schools superintendent’s 1960 progress report on implementation of the CI recommendations, fills nearly two hundred pages while saying very little about integration efforts. To repeat: the two most controversial aspects of the CI recommendations addressed teacher assignment and rezoning of attendance districts to promote integration. The report notes that the final CI recommendations, as modified by the Board of Ed, scaled back some of the main proposals of the sub-­commissions responsible for these two areas. For instance, whereas the zoning sub-­commission asserted that integration should be “a cardinal principle” of zoning, the final report says that integration should be one of nine principles considered in rezoning decisions. The final report also excludes the sub-­commission’s recommendation for an integration timetable. In short, Toward Greater Opportunity suggests that integration should be increased where feasible. Then it enumerates the difficulty of integration efforts, including the substantial proportion of children enrolled in nonpublic schools (about one-­third); the continued increase of the Black and Puerto Rican public school population (rising from 36 in 1957 to 41 percent in 1959); and difficulties in siting new schools to maximize integration. To this point, the Board of Estimate had the final say in site selection, and in the typical three-­year lag between site acquisition and building opening, the racial population of a neighborhood

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could change substantially.70 Virulent objections from teacher organizations had killed the possibility that experienced teachers might be required to rotate into “difficult” schools, which often had disproportionate numbers of inexperienced and substitute teachers. The progress report instead alludes vaguely to some success in efforts at voluntary rotation to these schools. In truth, voluntary teacher transfers were rare.71 This administrative checkpoint—­commission a study, dilute the recommendations, then fail to implement meaningfully—­was a board trademark. In November 1959, Kenneth Clark and a team of four advanced psychology undergraduates completed a study attempting to gauge the effects of the CI’s activities on principals and teachers in ten “subject” schools—­those with a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican population—­that had been included in the original PEA report.72 Clark did not claim that the sample of ten schools was representative. (Four other principals had declined to take part.) In the five years since the PEA had studied these schools, average math scores for sixth graders had improved somewhat, from slightly more than one year below grade level to slightly under a year. Reading scores were essentially unchanged, still more than a year below grade level. There appeared to be modest declines in the proportion of substitute teachers and in student-­to-­teacher ratios in these schools. Though administrators from all ten schools said they were aware of the CI’s recommendations, only one principal reported having discussed the recommendations with his staff. Seven of the ten said there had been no implementation of the CI’s recommendations; one said implementation was unnecessary because his school was integrated: one-­third Black and two-­thirds Puerto Rican. Though there were some exceptions, the predominant attitude of staff was “negation and rejection” of the students, who were seen as uneducable. One teacher in a Queens elementary school told the interviewer that “heredity ‘is what counts,’ and since they didn’t have a high culture in Africa and have not as yet built one in New York, they are genetically inferior from birth.” Another interviewer in a Manhattan elementary school reported that a teacher she had observed “had no understanding of these children. She kept pointing to them when talking about them so that even I was slightly embarrassed. She kept repeating, ‘You see what I mean?’ which I didn’t at all.” The report concluded that “the spirit of the work” of the CI “has not permeated the day-­to-­day activities of more than one or two of these schools.” More troubling than the meager changes in

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achievement and standards was “the dominant feeling” among teachers and administrators that “it is not possible to teach” their students in light of “poor heredity,” “poor home background,” and “cultural deprivation.”73 The distressing theme of the report would repeat itself frequently in the fight for integration: even when the central board specified clear pro-­integrative policies, the effect was negligible if administrators and teachers were not compelled to implement them on the ground, instead opting to construct their own administrative or meritocratic checkpoints. Even promising programs that did not touch the hot button of integration were implemented poorly. In 1956, the Clarks’ Northside Center for Child Development had launched a pilot demonstration guidance program at JHS 43, which stood at 129th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. (This was the school the Harlem Nine were assigned to.) Like many Harlem schools, JHS 43 had been regarded as a warehouse for “culturally deprived” students. “Teachers felt helpless to teach,” and the students “considered themselves failures.” Under the program, class sizes were reduced, extra help was extended, and enhanced counseling was made available. Teacher evaluations shifted from gauging their success at maintaining classroom order to their ability to impart academic skills. Students were reassured that they were “special,” “trustworthy,” and fully capable of learning; parents were encouraged to be active participants in their children’s education. The school administration bought in. No attempt was made to address the student’s “cultural deprivation.” The results were startling. One in four students who participated eventually attended college; before the program, one in twenty-­five did. The dropout rate declined from 50 percent to 25 percent. According to Clark, “the ‘miracle’ seemed due primarily to an implementation of the belief that [JHS 43] children could learn.”74 Intrigued by this success story, in 1959 the Board of Education attempted to apply this approach to a group of eighteen schools under the Higher Horizons program. According to David Rogers, “The original program was watered down and spread thin, and it immediately became ineffective. The administrative, financial, staffing, instructional and other problems in Higher Horizons schools were qualitatively so different from those in JHS 43 that it was almost an absurdity to extrapolate from that single case to the new program.” Moreover, the original program spent in excess of $250 per student, whereas Higher Horizons allocated a mere $40.75 Like many educational authorities, the New York City

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Board of Ed had a regrettable habit of launching experiments that were quickly abandoned.76 With many of these short-­lived experiments also receiving inadequate funding, it was difficult to know what was worth building on. To a cynic, the board was making a token effort to tell families who may have benefited, “Well, we tried.” To those families who feared that changes in education policies, particularly pro-­integration efforts, would disrupt their child’s education, the board implied, “Don’t worry, this is a very limited demonstration project that won’t be expanded.” Studies and Demonstration Projects Studies of educational issues and short-­lived demonstration projects often served as ineffectual substitutes for decisive action to reform the New York City school system. The Commission on Integration was an egregious example of an administrative checkpoint: a multi-­year study by a panel of well-­regarded experts that resulted in little tangible implementation. Debates about the commission’s recommendations revealed considerable resistance by teachers and (mainly white) parents to accept any changes to the system that would exact a personal price, as well as deep reluctance by the board to push back against these stakeholders. White New Yorkers’ views on race and schooling varied. Some, of course, were as fiercely segregationist as the most avowed white supremacists in Alabama. Others were truly committed to educational justice, equality, and integration for all of New York’s one million public school students. Based on reactions to even the board’s halting pro-­integrative steps, the largest group were those who tolerated school integration so long as it happened “naturally” in neighborhood schools and in proportions where their children remained firmly in the racial majority. In reality, housing segregation, which led to school segregation where children were assigned to schools by neighborhood, was far from natural. The city’s placement of public housing projects had exacerbated segregation. Real estate brokers steered potential buyers to neighborhoods whose populations matched their racial identity. Robert Moses’s highway-­building spree made “white flight” to suburbia easier and left devastated, bisected neighborhoods in its wake.77 Implicitly, the white majority held the power to veto—­or at least sharply curtail—­the board’s school integration initiatives. As we will see in the next chapter, in late 1950s Queens, white residents faced with the prospect of purportedly artificial school integration were not interested

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in historical or sociological explanations of Black disadvantage, nor were they very concerned about Black children in a nearby Brooklyn neighborhood being packed into overcrowded, under-­resourced schools. There was plenty of room in these Queens schools to accommodate the Black students from Brooklyn. Neighborhood residents simply wanted to maintain their distance from the elementary-­age youth coming from a few miles away.

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“Good Neighborhoods Do Not Just Happen”

sometimes notorious, for the frenetic pace of its street life. A visitor who had never set foot in the “outer boroughs” might well have been shocked to exit a subway station in Brooklyn or Queens and discover pedestrians moving unhurriedly through quiet neighborhoods of look-­alike, single-­family homes. In the late 1950s, the adjoining Queens neighborhoods of Glendale and Ridgewood, just east of the Brooklyn border, fit that description. Residents liked it that way: peaceful and insular. If, instead, the visitor left the station in nearby Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, their impression might have been quite different. Bed-­Stuy was a low-­income, Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood dotted with low-­rise public housing projects and multiunit, three-­or four-­story homes that had once been impressive, but many of which had fallen into disrepair. On the whole, residents were far less satisfied with the state of their neighborhood. Overcrowded, low-­performing, segregated schools ran high on their list of complaints. If families in Bed-­Stuy were disgruntled, why didn’t they just move to another neighborhood? After all, New York City had some of the toughest fair housing laws in the nation. In 1938, the State Assembly had passed the first housing anti-­ discrimination law in the nation; that law covered only public housing. Over the next two decades, the city and the state expanded and strengthened their open housing laws, culminating in the 1957 passage of the city’s Sharkey-­Brown-­Isaacs Law, which covered virtually all new private housing in addition to publicly subsidized housing.1 However, these open housing laws did not prevent neighborhood residents, real estate brokers, and insufficient paychecks from walling off white neighborhoods from “others.” Schools, however, were another matter. The Board of Education had the authority to alter school zones or assign students outside their attendance zone. Many residents may have viewed neighborhood MANHATTAN H A D L O N G BE E N FA M OU S ,

46

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schools as theirs, but they belonged to the city. Given frequent population shifts in neighborhoods throughout the city, the board would have been remiss not to address the allocation of students to schools, since some schools were severely overcrowded, while others had many empty seats. In 1940, the city population was 94 percent white. Manhattan was the least white borough at 83 percent; the remaining boroughs were all at least 95 percent white. By 1960, the city was 85 percent white, with Brooklyn reflecting the overall percentage white, Manhattan a bit lower (74 percent white), and the three other boroughs at least 88 percent white.2 Compared to other big cities with Black populations of at least 200,000, New York City in 1960 seemed relatively well-­ positioned to integrate its schools. It was the only American city with more than one million Black residents, but the Black proportion of the population was not very large, at 14 percent. The only large city with a smaller proportion was Los Angeles, at half a percentage point lower. In the remaining nine cities, Black residents constituted at least one-­fifth of the population. New York ranked third lowest of the eleven cities in its degree of residential segregation, as measured by the percentage of African Americans residing in census tracts that were at least 90 percent Black.3 Nevertheless, the population distribution of New York City had shifted considerably since the early 1940s. Whites in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens often left the established neighborhoods where they were raised, moving to neighborhoods further from Manhattan as new housing units, typically garden apartments and single-­family homes, sprang up in previously underpopulated areas. A sizable portion of white World War II veterans, aided by federal housing programs, moved to the quickly developing Long Island suburbs. Black families moved to New York from the South, and to a lesser extent from the West Indies; Puerto Ricans moved from the commonwealth to New York in great numbers in the 1950s, the result of severe economic problems on the island and the introduction of inexpensive, direct air travel to New York City.4 The growing Black and Puerto Rican populations confronted some difficult choices. How willing were they to make family sacrifices for school integration, sending their children greater distances and possibly subjecting them to hostility in their new schools, while white families were largely spared from these choices? Was quality, integrated education possible in the face of white resistance to even small-­scale integration efforts? Could Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers agree

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with one another on a common agenda to secure better education for their children? The conundrum of rapid racial change and how the city would manage it in the public schools first came into focus in Glendale-­Ridgewood. “Are These the Juvenile Delinquents That Glendale Fears?” On June 1, 1959, the Board of Ed announced that six schools in Bedford-­ Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, were substantially overcrowded, with two thousand extra students in grades three through five, and that parents of these children would be granted the option to transfer them to less crowded schools. Parents of around one thousand children chose to utilize this option. Six hundred were assigned to twelve schools in Brooklyn: six in Bed-­Stuy and six elsewhere in the borough. With all in-­borough options exhausted, the board planned to send the remaining four hundred to four schools (later expanded to five) in two nearby Queens neighborhoods, Glendale and Ridgewood, where around half of the 5,087 seats were empty. No student would have to travel more than 3.1 miles on the bus; the average trip would be half that far. The transfer plans would enable the Bed-­ Stuy students to attend the recommended five-­hour day; many schools in their neighborhood were on double sessions, causing students to attend school for only four hours.5 Glendale-­Ridgewood, with a population of 100,000, was predominantly German, with a substantial Irish population and some Italian families. Residents worked in factories and offices, and some in their own shops. Homes were “modest and immaculate.” Many families sent their children to Roman Catholic and Lutheran schools, likely one factor in the large number of empty seats in the public schools.6 On June 4, the Glendale Register published a front-­page editorial that urged local residents to attend a protest rally against the transfers and “tell the Board of Education the truth, that they do not want their children integrated with Negroes from another section of the city.” Local residents resented “forced” integration “just as much as the white people in southern states,” the editor asserted. Because the local Democratic Party needed Black and Puerto Rican votes, he said, “the city administration seems committed to a complete surrender of the city to Negroes and Puerto Ricans.” At the rally, which the Register dubbed the biggest meeting in Glendale in at least three decades, school board chair Margaret Kaiser said she had “never seen such a sneaky trick” in her twenty-­eight years as a board member.

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“Your hair would stand on end if you knew of the juvenile delinquency which exists in the area from which these children are coming.” Not to be outdone, a local Lutheran minister insisted: “The cause for which we are fighting is a just one. We are proud of our community and would like to keep it that way. We are not doing the wrong thing, for God taught us in the Scriptures to avoid evil associations. . . . I do not think we are helping these people by bringing them here. They have no respect for property and decency for our ladies and young girls.” Baseball pioneer turned syndicated columnist Jackie Robinson expressed outrage that Schools Superintendent John Theobald was apparently mulling whether to abandon the transfer plan: “What’s happening in New York? Has the spirit of Little Rock invaded our own great city? Must our own school board capitulate to the doctrine of [segregationist Arkansas governor] Faubus, even as espoused by the ‘solid citizens’ of Glendale and Ridgewood?”7 Bed-­Stuy parents interviewed by the Amsterdam News expressed optimism that the transfer would proceed smoothly, despite the angry objections in Queens, most loudly by the Glendale Taxpayers Association (GTA). Beatrice Wardlaw, a Brooklyn mother who was PTA president at one of the sending schools, retained her sunny outlook despite witnessing the Glendale gathering that resembled “a white citizens’ council meeting,” with a city councilman and police captain joining the minister in opposing the transfer because, they contended, the incoming eight-­to ten-­year-­olds would increase juvenile delinquency in the area.8 On June 24, Schools Superintendent John Theobald announced that the transfer decision was final, though opposing groups had the option to appeal to State Education Commissioner James E. Allen. The GTA argued that the transfer to Queens would be unnecessary if the Board of Ed assigned the students to a Bushwick (Brooklyn) school that was scheduled for closing. Theobald said this was not feasible and would cost $40,000 more than busing the students to Queens, which had an estimated $15,000 tab.9 The Bed-­Stuy students would be escorted past the established physical checkpoint to attend less-­crowded, statistically integrated schools. The following day, 250 to 300 Glendale-­Ridgewood parents—­primarily mothers—­marched around City Hall in the rain, carrying “Don’t Tread on Us” signs, and met for thirty minutes with Mayor Robert Wagner, Queens Borough President John Clancy, and City Council member George Schneider. The protestors denied that their concerns were rooted in racial prejudice, arguing that they

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opposed students crossing county lines and supported neighborhood schools. A small counter-­demonstration of around eight Black children and two mothers also took place. “This Is N.Y.C., Not Little Rock” read one sign; another asked, “Are These the ‘J.D.s’ [juvenile delinquents] That Glendale Fears?” Supporters of the transfer plan included the Intergroup Committee on New York’s Public Schools, representing thirty-­four social, civic, labor, and religious organizations, and the Queens Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress, which expressed “shock” at the “narrow, selfish attitude” of some of their fellow Queens residents.10 The Queens parents continued to fight the transfer through the summer, threatening legal action and appealing to school and city officials with a range of arguments, some more dubious than others. In addition to common claims that the transfers would result in increased juvenile delinquency and lower educational standards, a group of Protestant ministers alleged that some “unscrupulous agents” had attempted to convince whites to sell their homes at low prices, warning that their property values would drop once schools were integrated. Then, in a classic blockbusting scheme, the homes would be marketed to Black families at greatly inflated prices. An exploitative plan such as this was clearly repugnant, but Bed-­Stuy families could not fairly be asked to pay the price for it.11 Others argued that the proposed transfers placed an unfair and uncomfortable burden on local residents. A letter from the GTA secretary, published in the July 8 edition of the New York Times, maintained that “good neighborhoods do not just happen.” Rather, they come from “hard and earnest work to maintain a good and wholesome place in which to live and bring up their children by parents who accept their responsibility of seeing that their children have wholesome surroundings and companions. This is a fight for the principle of the neighborhood school.” The writer claimed, with questionable honesty, that the community would welcome a child of any background if there were available seats (of which there were many, in fact), but residents objected to “the means proposed”—­namely, busing students to Queens rather than to the Bushwick school that Theobald had rejected as infeasible. Bushwick abuts Ridgewood; there are no natural or otherwise noticeable delineations between Brooklyn and Queens in this location.12 Later in July, GTA lawyer Edward Burns told the board that Glendale-­ Ridgewood residents “just don’t like the idea of strangers coming into their

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neighborhood.” The residents were a “concise, tight-­fitting little group” and felt that the nearby schools were theirs.13 The pastor of a Roman Catholic church in Ridgewood amplified these claims. The priest characterized the neighborhoods as having problems assimilating German, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, and Austrian refugees: “These people are still feeling their way in this country and we think it is true to say, as a group, they are very wary of integration.”14 The audacity of this argument is stunning: essentially, that Black Americans—­many of whom had long roots in the US—­should be denied educational opportunities because recent European immigrants may feel uncomfortable attending school with them. Some other residents dispensed with all subtlety: “I am not against Negroes. I always say ‘God made the n—­—­s in the night and just forgot to make them white.’”15 Rivalling the offensiveness of such blatant expressions of racism were claims by Glendale-­Ridgewood residents that their concerns were really for the Bed-­ Stuy children. In an appeal to State Education Commissioner Allen to rescind the transfer plan, five Queens mothers professed that they were “acutely aware of the educational disadvantages of uprooting children of totally different background and transporting them to an entirely different environment where they will be deposited in schools remote from their homes and to be left at lunchtime without means of going home for lunch and without cafeteria facilities to accommodate them. This will surely disrupt the schools.”16 They neglected at least two important questions. Couldn’t some of the many remaining unused classrooms be used for lunchtime? And why this newfound concern for the abbreviated and inadequate education that the Brooklyn children long had been receiving in their overcrowded neighborhood schools? In July, some of the Bed-­Stuy parents sat down with the new police captain in Glendale, the meeting having been arranged by a consultant from the United Parents Association (UPA). The parents made their anxiety about the coming school year apparent, requesting that the buses and schools be searched “immediately before the children entered them. The bombing of a school was a very real possibility to them,” given the inflammatory statements that had been made by some Glendale residents. When the UPA consultant suggested that a parent representative stay in the school for the day in the event of a sick child, the captain replied that a police car could transport the ill child. The parents objected, understanding “that if a police car took one of their children from the school, this could never be explained to the Glendale community as illness.”17

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On the cusp of the new school year, Superintendent Theobald met with nervous Bed-­Stuy parents about the impending transfer. While attempting to offer reassurances about their children’s safety, he denied their requests to bring their children to school on the first day, demanding that they steer clear of their children’s new schools for two or three weeks: “Help me out. This is not a normal situation. Stay away.” He quelled the concern that their children would be transferred out of the Queens schools within six months or a year, telling them that their children would complete elementary school there. However, no future cohorts of Bed-­Stuy students would be sent to Glendale-­Ridgewood, as construction of four new schools in Bed-­Stuy was scheduled for completion in 1960.18 Thus, their younger siblings could expect to receive segregated elementary educations. This brief respite from segregation for some Bed-­Stuy children encapsulated the board’s focus on political appeasement of both Black and white families at the expense of crafting authentic solutions to the educational problems of segregation and inequality. In other words, the board would manage the controversy by manipulating administrative checkpoints, rather than addressing the educational issues at the core. In Glendale-­Ridgewood, anxiety about the enrollment of the new transfer students had eased a bit, as the city’s Commission on Intergroup Relations had been working during the summer to assure a smooth start to the school year. Local clergy were recruited to advocate acceptance of the transfer plan, encouraging their congregants to welcome the new students with “Christian love.” That spirit was not much in evidence at a final protest rally on Thursday, September 10, four days before the beginning of the school year. Speaking to a crowd of three hundred, William Cedzich—­running as an independent candidate for Queens borough president—­dismissed the “diabolical and senseless plan” to achieve racial integration in city schools, despite the board’s denial that the transfer was motivated by such a concern. “You’re being used as hamsters and guinea pigs,” he told local residents. A state senator who rose to defend the plan was “hooted down.” The neighborhood Ministers Association planned to have members appear at the five schools on opening day to calm any crowds that might gather.19 On the first day of the school year, 307 of the 363 Bed-­Stuy children boarded six buses to take them to their new schools. Some parents were confused about the bus schedules; others probably feared for their children’s safety. The Brooklyn contingent would have to wait to meet many of their new white classmates, as

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971 of the 2,329 registered white students stayed at home. This 42 percent no-­ show rate exceeded the proportion of absent students on the first day that Little Rock, Arkansas, had integrated its schools in 1957. At the five Queens schools in question, the absentee rate had ranged from 3 to 10 percent on the first day of the 1958–­59 school year. Glendale-­Ridgewood mothers picketed at two or three of the five schools, with some parents milling around the other schools as well. At PS 68, janitors scurried to erase the warning “Blacks Go Home,” painted in four locations on the school’s exterior, before the children arrived. Pickets at PS 91 in Glendale grew to around fifty participants at the end of the school day. According to the New York Times, “the [59] Negro children clung to one another as they trooped from the school. None cried and some managed to smile shyly at the spectators.” There were no reports of students being mistreated inside the schools.20 On the second day of the school year, white attendance approached normal levels, while only five more Black students attended than on opening day. The school day was relatively quiet, with only brief pickets at two schools. A bomb scare at one school was discovered to be a hoax. Three days later, a small group of picketers, sixteen in total, marched around two Glendale-­Ridgewood schools.21 In October, a reporter from the United Press wire service reported that the children on both sides of the color line had adjusted well. One veteran teacher described the Brooklyn children as “nice” but deemed it “unfair to the neighborhood” to “force” the new children on them. The plan was also “unfair” to the transfer students, since the increased travel—­3.1 miles at maximum—­“makes it such a long and tiring day for them.” Early in the school year, children on the bus were buoyed by adults in their own neighborhood who waved and shouted words of encouragement “as though they were welcoming home a team that had won the state basketball title.”22 As Thanksgiving approached, the Glendale Taxpayers Association continued to pursue a court order to rescind the transfer program. That effort would prove unsuccessful.23 After the first few weeks of the school year, local newspapers reported little news about the Glendale-­Ridgewood schools. Presumably, this was a good sign. However, a February incident at a Glendale school offered a sobering reminder that racial stereotypes and discriminatory treatment do not dissipate into the lovely ether of integration. Principal Minerva Atkins, acting on an anonymous phone tip suggesting that Black children were carrying weapons to school, searched all sixty-­eight Black students, but none of the white ones. She turned

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up two geometry compasses and a plastic toy gun. The Board of Ed apologized to the parents and, in typical behavior, transferred Atkins to the principalship of an integrated school in the Bronx. Parents there complained to the Bronx branch of the NAACP after learning of Atkins’s reassignment.24 Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Glendale-­Ridgewood uproar is how sensible and limited the transfer plan was. The board consistently insisted that the transfers were a temporary measure until more schools were built in Bed-­Stuy over the next several years. Glendale-­Ridgewood schools were as underutilized as Bed-­Stuy ones were overcrowded. A person could travel from one neighborhood to the other by bicycle in around ten minutes. Three hundred and sixty students spread out over five schools was not a massive influx. Given the all-­white nature of the schools in the two Queens neighborhoods, “tipping” the schools from all white to overwhelmingly Black and Puerto Rican was unlikely. There would still be over sixty empty classrooms in Glendale-­Ridgewood after the transfers were implemented. A one-­to three-­mile ride on a bus—­which none of the Queens children would have to board—­was not unreasonable. The objection to students crossing undetectable borough lines within New York City held no water. It was hard to imagine that a group of eight-­to ten-­year-­olds would spark an infectious wave of juvenile delinquency. It was even harder to imagine that the Glendale-­Ridgewood parents would have had any serious objections to white students from outside traveling to fill empty seats. If limited, temporary, one-­way busing of Black and Puerto Rican students ignited such a firestorm, the prospects for a more encompassing integration plan in the city seemed remote. Supposed alternatives to integration, such as the Higher Horizons program of compensatory education for low-­income students, were limited by lack of funding, among other factors. The potential expansion of one-­way busing was killed by board timidity in the face of white furor. The Glendale-­Ridgewood situation evoked the “freedom of choice” plans that a large percentage of Southern localities adopted to claim that they were acceding to desegregation, even as they sought to dissuade Black students from transferring to white schools. Black parents were often encouraged to drop their transfer requests. If they did not, violent or economic reprisals, or at least the threat of them, might result. Integration, when it did occur, was unidirectional, depending on the bravery of Black parents to send their children to white schools. Virtually no white parents applied to have their children assigned to Black schools.25 While

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there is no evidence suggesting that the parents in Queens resorted to warnings of reprisal, a number made every effort to make Black parents and students feel like unwanted invaders in their new schools. The uproar in Glendale-­Ridgewood was one of the first conflicts over “busing” and “neighborhood schools” in a non–­Jim Crow city after the Brown decision. As Matthew Delmont recounts: “This rhetorical shift allowed [white parents] to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly racist language.” Many localities, rural and urban, had long transported students by bus without any argument from white parents; some Black families justifiably complained when their children were forced to endure lengthy bus rides to maintain segregation. For example, over half of Boston’s middle school students and 85 percent of high school students had ridden school buses prior to court-­ordered busing for numerical integration in the 1970s. When the rationale changed, busing shifted from a convenient mode of transportation to a source of virulent outrage.26 Throughout the North, white families were reluctant to say they had issues with minimal numbers of Black students in their children’s schools, but they were less reticent when it came to the prospect of equal proportions. A 1959 Gallup poll of white parents in Northern states indicated that only 7 percent admitted they would object to “sending [their] children to a school where a few of the children are colored.” However, nearly six in ten (58 percent) said they would oppose sending their children to a school where half the children were “colored.” In a 1963 poll of white adults in the North (by Alsop and Quayle), 75 percent supported the Brown decision. But when asked whether, “other things being equal, would you prefer that they went to integrated school, all white, or would it make no difference to you?” 17 percent chose integrated and 42 percent chose all-­white, with the remainder choosing “no difference.”27 Integration Pressure Intensifies If many Glendale-­Ridgewood parents continued to chafe at the presence of “outsiders” in their neighborhood schools, local integrationist groups lambasted school officials for their limited attempts to increase integration. Indeed, school officials consistently denied that transfers had integration as their aim: it was merely a matter of sending children from overcrowded schools to underutilized ones. Milton Galamison had butted heads with school officials since the mid-­1950s. The Black Presbyterian minister with a resonant speaking voice was

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typically photographed in a suit and tie, often with a smile on his face. But his battle with city education officials over segregation at JHS 258 in 1956 had brought only frustration. During his time with the Brooklyn NAACP, Galamison’s aggressive stance toward the board and his tendency to speak publicly before consulting with others in the organization put him at odds with more moderate members of the branch, as well as the national NAACP, headquartered in New York City. Despite these tensions, Galamison was elected branch president in December 1956. He declined to seek reelection in October 1959, having chafed at the time spent on his administrative responsibilities at the NAACP and the excision of the Brooklyn branch’s fervently pro-­integration board members. In early 1960, Galamison, joined by NAACP members Annie Stein and Clair Cumberbatch, began formulating plans to create an independent, citywide committee to pursue school integration. It would name itself the Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools. Most of its activity was concentrated in Brooklyn, where Galamison, the president and spokesperson, was based. Stein was the primary organizer, making contacts with PTA parents, delivering reports at meetings, and taking the lead in fundraising and other matters, but preferred to remain in the background. Drawing upon the membership and activist history of existing parent-­teacher organizations, whose membership consisted mostly of African American mothers of schoolchildren, Galamison and Stein proved key in developing an organization and a vision for the school integration movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The Parents’ Workshop linked Brooklyn parents from different neighborhoods, social classes, races, and ethnicities in the battle for school integration.28 Schools Superintendent John Theobald agreed to meet with the Parents’ Workshop on April 25, 1960. To Theobald’s surprise, Galamison was accompanied by two hundred parents from the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bed-­Stuy, Williamsburg, and Brownsville. They aired their grievances about school zoning policies, insufficient staffing in segregated schools, and the board’s refusal to ramp up the Glendale-­Ridgewood transfer program. Theobald offered virtually nothing in terms of concessions. According to the Amsterdam News, “Theobald suggested that the city is not ready for integration and that he could only proceed by gradual, imperceptible degrees.” Physical checkpoints would remain intact. Galamison accused the city’s school-­zoning unit of “planning to bus for segregation in the best Georgia tradition.”29

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Attendees demanded voluntary student transfers for integration, even in the absence of shortened class days or utilization issues, as well as greater allocation of qualified teachers to ghetto schools and a specific timetable for integration of city schools. They would receive no such promises.30 In the aftermath of the meeting, Galamison and Theobald exchanged curt correspondence. The Brooklyn minister took issue with “the continuing refusal of the Board of Education to remedy the inequities against which we have complained” and “the indifferent treatment we have received” from school officials. “Perhaps it is just as well that you have no time to meet with my parents again, since meetings seem to have availed us nothing,” Galamison wrote. “I only assure you that we feel we have exhausted every rational avenue of negotiation” and we intend to solve these problems “with or without the cooperation of those to whom we have cordially appealed.”31 The board’s June 1960 capital budget, which included building more schools in segregated neighborhoods and closing some underutilized white schools (which could enroll Black and Puerto Rican children), further enraged the Parents’ Workshop, which highlighted the increasing number of segregated schools and accused the city of “bringing education equality by the teaspoon and throwing it out with a bulldozer.”32 Despite the unfriendly exchange between the minister and the superintendent, after the Parents’ Workshop launched a number of rallies for educational equality in the summer of 1960, Theobald agreed to meet with members of the workshop and other civil rights leaders on the eve of the 1960–­61 school year. Feeling the pressure from a summer of activism and the threat of a boycott on the first day of school, the superintendent agreed to create the Open Enrollment (OE) program. OE was launched as a pilot program in fall 1960 and expanded to a full program the following September. Under this initiative, students from schools that were at least 90 percent Black and/or Puerto Rican could transfer to schools where at least three-­quarters of the students were white and utilization of classroom space was below 90 percent.33 Customarily, students were assigned to elementary and junior high schools, as well as some high schools, on the basis of neighborhood residence. Highly segregated neighborhoods meant highly segregated schools. In 1961, fewer than 5 percent of the nearly 50,000 eligible elementary students availed themselves of this option, though nearly 60 percent of the 3,973 eligible junior high students did so.34 By spring 1966, over 14,000 elementary students had transferred under Open Enrollment (which was expanded in 1964), as had nearly 8,000 junior high students.35

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From March to December 1961, the United Parents Association (UPA) studied forty Open Enrollment schools that accounted for 40 percent of the transfers in the city. The organization found “considerable overt good will” toward OE from receiving parents. When receiving parents complained, they typically did not express opposition to integration or OE; instead, they overemphasized “problems” in the schools, expressed “sudden interest in improving sending schools,” and avouched that OE would not solve educational issues in the city. While some receiving principals welcomed OE, others were “openly trying to arouse their parents against Open Enrollment. . . . During this period no one felt a positive commitment on the part of the Board to make this work.” Administrative checkpoints, both centralized and local, limited the reach of OE. Sending parents were mostly happy with the experiences of their children in their new schools. In some instances, board promises that receiving schools would receive additional resources and would not be overcrowded failed to be carried through. This situation soured some receiving parents and staff on Open Enrollment.36 While the UPA study of Open Enrollment offered some cause for guarded optimism, this voluntary, one-­way integration program was a far cry from a system-­wide commitment to integration. Some families continued to fight personally to secure a high-­quality education for their Black children. In 1962, Elaine Bibuld (who was Black) and Jerome Bibuld (who was white) battled the Board of Ed to assure that their children would not receive a substandard, segregated education. Backed by the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) Brooklyn branch, where they were members, the Bibulds fought to transfer their three elementary-­age children from PS 282, their school in Park Slope—­which failed to challenge Douglass, their oldest—­to one with respectable student reading and math levels and a proportion of regularly licensed teachers that at least hit the city median. After turning to homeschooling their children rather than sending them to 282, the city summoned the parents to family court, accusing them of neglect for keeping their children out of school. This move echoed the city’s approach to the Harlem Nine. The Bibulds could lose child custody and face up to a year in prison. In response, the family arranged for their children to attend PS 200, a high-­performing school in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, where the Black student population stood at around 2 percent. After consulting with board officials, the principal explained that he could not enroll the Bibuld children because they resided outside the school’s zone, but they would be allowed to remain as unofficial student “guests” for an indefinite period.37

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The Board of Education and the city stuck to their Harlem Nine playbook, eventually making the Bibulds a compromise offer after a six-­day sit-­in by Brooklyn CORE at board headquarters. Once again, the board tried to douse the fire without contemplating more far-­reaching changes to the ways that students were sorted by race and class. On February 4, 1963, nine days before their tentative sentencing date, the Bibulds—­exhausted by the fight and the harassment they had endured—­accepted the board’s offer to enroll their three children at PS 130, which was convenient to travel to by subway, was 20 percent Black and Puerto Rican, had strong math and reading scores, and had classes for “gifted” students. The Bibulds knew that the arrangement did nothing to weaken the vice of segregation for Black and Puerto Rican students throughout the system. In retrospect, Jerome Bibuld rued the outcome: “We lost. But it appeared that we won.”38 The possibility of system-­wide, statistical integration was dimming as school demographics continued to shift. From 1959 to 1968, the Black proportion of the public school population rose from 20 to 32 percent, and the Hispanic proportion from 15 to 22. Combined, the Black and Hispanic public school population jumped from around one-­third to over half in a decade’s time. Widespread statistical integration in New York City was becoming less and less viable as demographics shifted rapidly.39 Where Can White Liberals Live Up to Their Ideals? White New Yorkers who considered themselves racially liberal and did not object to school integration as long as they were comfortable with the demographic makeup of their children’s schools—­in other words, a solid white majority—­ struggled to square their ideals with the real-­life choices they were required to make. A school worker encapsulated the irony of making educational choices for one’s children in America’s purportedly most progressive city: “It is easier for a liberal to live up to his ideals in Teaneck than it is in Manhattan these days.”40 Teaneck, a New Jersey town of 42,000, located five miles from Manhattan, enjoyed a growing reputation as a racially progressive town. While its Black population, which was predominantly white collar, had grown from less than 1 percent in 1950 to 4.2 percent a decade later, white families there had little cause to be apprehensive about rapid demographic change.41 This was not the case in New York City. It was also easier for Northern liberals to live up to their ideals in the South, rather than at home. Though the presence of outside activists before the ’60s was

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limited, Black New Yorkers proved a crucial resource for civil rights efforts in the South. As described in Martha Biondi’s account of postwar civil rights struggles in New York City, they “led lobbying campaigns in Washington, provided legal support, created solidarity networks, raised money, and gathered petitions aimed at overthrowing southern Jim Crow.”42 Vito Marcantonio, who had represented East Harlem in Congress from 1934 to 1950 (with a gap between 1936 and 1938), and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., elected to represent Harlem in 1944, proved to be two of the fiercest advocates for civil rights legislation in Congress. Beginning in the mid-­1950s, Powell had regularly proposed a legislative amendment that would prevent the distribution of federal funds to segregated institutions. Introduction of the “Powell Amendment” put liberals in a bind: vote against the amendment and appear hypocritical, or vote for it and risk killing a bill they supported.43 New York activists fought to end segregation in the military, eliminate poll taxes, mobilize against lynching, and block the seating of fiercely racist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo.44 The Big Apple was well represented on the 1961 Freedom Rides to fight segregation in public transportation in the South. Of the four hundred plus Freedom Riders in 1961, over sixty listed a New York City residence; eleven of them were Black, including Stokely Carmichael, CORE national director James Farmer, and future Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton.45 Malcolm X dismissed Northern Freedom Riders as “ridiculous,” since “their own Northern ghettoes, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy.” If Northern Freedom Riders wanted to be useful, they “could work on the roots of such ghetto evils as the little children out in the streets at midnight, with apartment keys around their necks to let themselves in, and their mothers and fathers drunk, drug addicts, thieves, prostitutes.” Or they “could light some fires under Northern city halls, unions, and major industries” to give Black workers more jobs to remove them from relief and welfare. “It was all—­it is all—­the absolute truth; but what did I want to say it for? Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal.” Northern liberals, he adjudged, have “have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.”46 In the summer of 1963, sixteen students from Queens College and roughly thirty New York City school teachers traveled to Prince Edward County, Virginia, to teach Black students in Freedom Schools for five weeks. Richard Parrish, a Black vice president of the national American Federation of Teachers, was the driving force behind United Federation of Teachers (UFT) participation in the

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endeavor. Prince Edward County, refusing to desegregate its school system as mandated by the Brown decision, had abandoned public education in 1959. While the vast majority of white students experienced no disruption in education, thanks to segregated private schools that were created in the wake of the closings, nearly three in four Black students had spent those years unschooled. The Prince Edward project represented the first major effort to recruit an integrated group of outside teachers and students to educate Black students in a civil rights battleground over an entire summer.47 The summer educational programs in Prince Edward helped pave the way for the nearly fifty Freedom Schools that served about 2,500 Mississippi students, from preschoolers to adults, during the summer of 1964, widely known as Freedom Summer. UFT teachers Sandra Adickes and Norma Becker took part in both projects, helped to recruit other New York City teachers for the Mississippi Project, and participated in the initial planning meeting for the Mississippi Freedom Schools in March 1964, as did Rachel Weddington, a Black Queens College faculty member who supervised the college volunteers in Prince Edward County.48 At the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, Newsweek estimated that around forty thousand New York City residents made the 240-­mile trip to Washington, in six hundred chartered buses and ten specially arranged trains. Another dozen walked from Brooklyn. The march was the brainchild of New York–­based A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and was organized by his assistant, Bayard Rustin. New York City union presence at the march was quite prominent: indeed, four local unions accounted for 2 to 3 percent of those attending the march. However, “organized labor played a complex role in the swelling campaign for racial equality, supporting it in the abstract but coming under increasing criticism for its own discriminatory practices,” as Joshua B. Freeman observes.49 New York Heats Up Back in New York, by late 1962, the Galamison-­led Parents’ Workshop had come to realize that targeted action to force board action on integration in specific cases was doing little to change the overall picture, especially in light of growing Black and Puerto Rican student populations. Members also concluded that the board’s tendency to order regular studies of the segregation problem was simply a delaying tactic—­in other words, an administrative checkpoint.

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In summer 1963, the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools was created, comprising all six local NAACP chapters; CORE chapters representing Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx; the Parents’ Workshop; and the Harlem Parents Committee. According to Clarence Taylor, the more moderate national organizations—­or at least their local branches—­decided to join with grassroots groups after realizing that friendly negotiations were not moving the needle and that grassroots groups were gaining publicity and credit (as well as criticism) for their more aggressive school desegregation initiatives. Galamison was tapped to head the Citywide Committee.50 Schools Superintendent Calvin Gross, who had taken over that post early in the year, announced that the board’s integration plans included an expanded voluntary transfer policy, rezoning for integration, regular meetings with civil rights leaders, enhanced recruitment of Black and Puerto Rican teachers, improved education in low-­income schools, a heightened emphasis on Black and Puerto Rican history, and perhaps school pairing. Two-­way busing was off the table. New York State Education Commissioner James Allen, who was a firm advocate of integration, praised Gross’s vision, but rights leaders remained unenthusiastic.51 Meanwhile, ominous signs of heightened racial conflict in the city began to emerge. In May 1963, the Amsterdam News reported that “Harlem hoodlums” used a rally in support of the Birmingham civil rights campaign “to start an incipient riot” on West 125th Street. Police quelled the disturbance, arresting four, but not before some stores had windows smashed and merchandise looted.52 A month later, the Black newspaper again attributed some minor violence in Harlem to local “hoodlums,” sparked by allegations that a Black police officer had shoved and attempted to handcuff a “snowball” (shaved ice with sweet syrup) vendor, but traced the cause to “pent-­up frustrations” resulting from job discrimination, unemployment, inadequate recreational facilities nearby, and failing community leadership. The headline read “Harlem Seething, Cops Double Force.” The subhead was “Riot Mood.” Twenty-­seven people were arrested for disorderly conduct and other charges.53 Near the end of July, the same paper boldly declared: “The suddenly volatile petrols of long-­standing Negro discontent and unredressed grievances flowed together throughout the five boroughs this week, swelling into a highly inflammable flood of fuel that glimmered precariously near the flash point as both Gov. Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner hustled to stanch the threat of racial holocaust.”

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In Brooklyn, demonstrations demanding hiring of more Black and Puerto Rican workers at Downstate Medical Center continued. In Manhattan, sixteen members of CORE and other civil rights group sat in at City Hall and the governor’s office, fasting for forty-­eight hours and insisting that discriminatory hiring practices in the construction industry cease. In Queens, the NAACP’s Corona–­East Elmhurst branch demanded a comprehensive plan and clear timetable for school integration, as well as transfer of nearly 3,400 junior high school students whose open enrollment requests were rejected. In Staten Island, two construction sites for new schools drew pickets.54 Two weeks later, the Times reported in a similar vein that the increasing number of Black protests in the city reflected “a rising discontent”: “Suddenly, it seems, the Negro is mad at everybody.” Why? “Events in Birmingham and Jackson—­the fire hoses and the police dogs, James Meredith and Ole Miss—­all have angered Negroes in the North. But the terrible unemployment, the bad housing, the bad schools” at home had also fueled rising anger, Kenneth Clark remarked. Hulan Jack, the Black former borough president of Manhattan who now served as a Democratic district leader in Harlem, warned: “You can feel the tension over these stinking housing conditions rising up like heat from the sidewalks. Rats are taking over some of these buildings. And you think people should accept this—­that their children should have to live in this? Why, some people around here are ready to kill landlords.” Others pointed to the decolonization and independence of African nations as standing in painful contrast to the stasis of New York City. The story ended by emphasizing that the protest movement had “spread like fire” through the Black community.55 The following summer, fire would rage far beyond the realm of simile in Harlem and Bed-­Stuy. If some whites were making plans to join the suburban exodus, others were determined to terminate the slow progress toward racial equality. In mid-­July, local civil rights activists picketed outside a fast food restaurant, protesting the hiring policies of the restaurant chain of which it was a part. For four nights, as the interracial group of protestors picketed peacefully, “white hoodlums . . . traveling by car in roving gangs carrying the Confederate flag as their banner have subjected any Negroes in the area to almost inhuman treatment and pelted the peaceful pickets with eggs and stones in full view of the city police,” the Amsterdam News reported. The protestors, from a local CORE chapter, had stationed themselves outside a White Castle on Boston Road and Allerton Avenue in the

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Bronx. The group of one thousand malevolent whites included one wearing a Klan-­like hood and waving a large cross. One couple reported that protestors battered their car with bricks, stones, and iron; officers at the local police precinct refused to take their report. A local Presbyterian pastor recounted: “For a time it was just like [Mississippi] out here. Young boys were speeding in their hopped-­up autos and spitting at the pickets. They shouted all sorts of insults and used filthy profanity.”56 As the altercations in the Bronx made clear, the many manifestations of white resistance to racial justice could be found even in the most purportedly liberal of American cities. The 1964 Boycott for Integrated Schools When the 1963–­64 school year opened, Reverend Galamison warned that the Citywide Committee could, with a single phone call, launch a boycott of segregated schools “within minutes.”57 Militant members, including the Brooklyn minister, had argued internally for a sustained boycott, but moderate members successfully made the case for a single-­day school sit-­out. The Citywide Committee informed the Board of Education that it would move ahead with the boycott if the board did not put forth a genuine program for school desegregation, including timetables, by December 1. The board agreed to release a tentative plan by that date and a final plan in February. What finally emerged from Schools Superintendent Calvin Gross and the board on December 9 was a progress report and a proposed expansion of Open Enrollment, which gave students in overcrowded, segregated schools the option to transfer to underutilized, integrated ones.58 This was not nearly enough for the Citywide Committee, which did not view piecemeal, voluntarist approaches to school segregation as a legitimate solution. On the first Sunday of the new year, the board released another report, touting its progress in reducing the number of predominantly white schools and achieving “an improved ethnic distribution” of students in the school system. However, the board also acknowledged that the number of predominantly Black and Puerto Rican elementary and junior high schools had more than doubled over the past six years, a result of increases in those populations and expansions of the typically segregated neighborhoods they lived in.59 Board data from summer 1963 indicated that 39 percent of elementary schools (of 578), 43 percent of junior high schools (of 131), and 29 percent of high schools (of 86) had Black and Puerto Rican enrollments of 50 percent or more.60

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Three days later, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins announced that the national organization would follow the lead of eleven area local branches and support the boycott. This represented a shift from earlier in the week, when Wilkins had declined to commit to boycotts in New York, saying the NAACP “believes it is better for children to go to school than to stay home.” In his subsequent statement, Wilkins explained that the NAACP continued to hold this perspective as a general rule, but that the organization would support parents who decided to boycott. In a subtle swipe, Galamison expressed the Citywide Committee’s delight that “Roy Wilkins has come around finally” to back the boycott.61 June Shagaloff, Wilkins’s colleague at the NAACP, helmed the organization’s efforts to integrate over eighty schools in eighteen Northern and Western states. New York City, like many other locales, relied on a pair of “evasive plans” to make the case that they were promoting integration, she said. One consisted of desegregation plans that were “piecemeal, token or less than token and inadequate to meet the problems of de facto segregation in public schools.” The other was to respond to desegregation demands with vows to elevate educational standards: “If the Savannah, Ga., board of education proposed a program to raise standards—­no matter how badly needed—­in lieu of plans for desegregation, they would be called ‘separate but equal.’” Kenneth Clark alleged that “almost invariably, these [predominantly Black] schools . . . perpetuate woefully and intolerably low educational standards. These schools spawn functional illiterates.”62 In schools with competitive admissions, meritocratic checkpoints reinforced school segregation, given the poor preparation that most Black students were afforded. Upgrading and integrating New York schools would not come cheap, with some experts estimating that $200 million would be required to make a start.63 The chasm between what the Citywide Committee was demanding and what the Board of Education was offering was unmistakable. The committee called for elimination of racial imbalance in the 165 elementary and junior high schools with large Black and Puerto Rican populations; better integration of the 225 schools—­over one-­quarter of the total—­that were at least 90 percent white; widespread pairing of minority and white schools to achieve integration; closing schools in the center of minority neighborhoods that could not be desegregated; a moratorium on the school-­construction program to review the effect of building new schools that increased racial segregation; and immediate planning of

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educational parks, vast complexes serving huge, racially and economically mixed school populations. The board’s plans were far less ambitious, calling for desegregation of thirty schools without long-­distance busing and leaving segregated schools virtually untouched in places such as Harlem; pairing twenty sets of predominantly Black and predominantly white schools; closing one segregated high school (Girls High School in Bedford-­Stuyvesant); and reviewing plans for educational parks and school construction.64 Of these initiatives, pairing was the most controversial, as it involved involuntary transfers of white students as well as Black and Puerto Rican ones. Under this arrangement, the board would rezone and consolidate two nearby elementary or junior high schools, one predominantly Black and Puerto Rican, the other predominantly white. In the elementary school case, students in the rezoned area would, for example, attend one school for grades one through three and the other for grades four through six. (Kindergarten students would remain in their neighborhood school.)65 For all that Board President James Donovan would later downplay the boycott, he and Schools Superintendent Gross had tried in the preceding weeks to convince protest leaders to cancel the February 3 demonstration. Effective February 1, the board had agreed to replace the Open Enrollment policy with the Free Choice plan. The existing policy permitted students in segregated schools to request a transfer to a school assigned by educational officials. Under the revised plan, students in racially imbalanced schools had the option to transfer to any school with available space. Schools Superintendent Gross increased pressure on sending-­school principals to apprise parents of this option; in earlier years, many parents were unaware of this opportunity or were persuaded by school staff to keep their child in the current school (a local administrative checkpoint). The first year of Free Choice was promising, as around 30 percent of eligible students transferred, but as pressures by pro-­integration groups weakened, transfers fell the next year to around 15 percent.66 Galamison asserted that the proposed plan did not move the needle and that only mandatory busing of white students to predominantly Black and Puerto Rican schools would achieve the necessary degree of integration. “Anybody who thinks we can achieve integration voluntarily in this country has no idea how sick we are,” the minister intoned. Skeptics argued that such a step would only accelerate the exodus of white students from the city’s public schools, further entrenching segregation.67

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Gross, who had moved from Pittsburgh less than a year earlier, was likable to some and ineffectual to others. While acknowledging that slum schools clearly needed improvement, he denied that New York City schools were segregated because there was no deliberate policy to separate children by race. Like many school officials, he blamed racial imbalance in the schools on segregated housing patterns.68 Donovan was far more confrontational. He had risen to prominence after negotiating a prisoner exchange that freed Americans captured by Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He would not be intimidated by civil rights leaders, whom he described as “dealing in jingles” and unable to offer “constructive, practical plans” for school integration. The Board of Ed, he contended, is “doing more than those who are advocating freedom now and integration now.” Jackie Robinson wondered whether the detained Americans’ calls for freedom were, to Donovan, merely jingles, or whether he had allowed Fidel Castro “to warn him to ‘be patient.’”69 With an easily reddened face and a manner that sometimes drew comparisons to a bulldog, Donovan could be harsh in his criticisms of those who he believed had crossed him. Two and a half weeks before the boycott, he attempted to explain the board’s position: it believed that integration was the “most urgent single factor” in education right now, “but that does not mean, as some extremists have advocated, that integration is the all-­out objective in and of itself to the extent of destroying the public school system, as one [referring to Galamison] has said he would have rather done.” He warned of the “grave danger” of “responsible leaders . . . having their leadership threatened by some irresponsible publicity-­ seekers who don’t come to the Board of Education to give us any constructive idea on how to aid in this problem, but instead just march chanting, and then screaming: ‘Let’s get arrested.’” Donovan could not “believe that these [Black] mothers are going to have their children made pawns for the ambitions of a couple of irresponsible people,” whom he declined to name. The day before the boycott, Donovan was not looking to make peace: “There comes a time when you have to forsake the so-­called language of diplomacy. You have to use simple, blunt, Anglo-­Saxon that the least educated man can understand.”70 The board’s Committee for School Integration had released a revised plan on January 19 that outlined eight principles for integration and highlighted its plans for school pairing. The board instructed Superintendent Gross to submit a citywide plan that included a clear timetable for integration, use of school

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pairing “wherever possible” below the high school level, and mandatory transfer of some students from overcrowded to underutilized schools. The liberal New York Post said implementation of the principles “should satisfy all reasonable men who seek honorable solutions.” The paper would deem it “tragic if this responsive, intelligent approach were to be undermined by racist resistance in the white community or by reckless rhetoric on the civil rights fringe. Now is the time for New York to reaffirm the historical tradition of the ‘melting pot’ and to set an example for communities in both the North and the South.” Galamison initially expressed “surprise” at the announcement, given that it represented “the first new material we have had since August.” The Brooklyn minister was more critical the following day, expressing skepticism that the board’s principles would be implemented citywide. “This is no plan,” he scoffed, “and it’s unfair to give people the impression” that it was. Only “a very slim possibility” remained for the boycott to be called off.71 On January 29, the board again offered another modified integration plan. It had found 134 elementary schools that were at least 90 percent Black and Puerto Rican and 31 junior highs that were at least 85 percent Black and Puerto Rican. The board said it had identified twenty possible pairings at the elementary level and ten at the junior high level that would fulfill its qualifying criteria with respect to distance between schools, travel time for students, and other factors. At both levels, “a beginning would be made” in September 1964, with half the eligible elementary schools and all the eligible junior highs being paired by the following September. The remaining eligible elementary schools would be paired in fall 1966. A board official boasted that the plan was “the most constructive thing done [with respect to integration] in the country” but was unlikely to satisfy those who wanted the board to “push too far and too fast.”72 It is safe to say that the board official had Galamison in mind. The weekend before the boycott, organizers geared up for the big day at the minister’s Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bed-­Stuy, arranging lunches for out-­of-­school students, preparing a briefing for individuals teaching Black history at Freedom Schools, distributing handbills at Sunday church services, and circulating instructions for picketers. Galamison refused to predict the size of the boycott, but other leaders said fifty thousand boycotting students would be considered successful. Board of Ed officials believed the boycott “won’t be a widespread thing.” Some boycott leaders feared violence by white hecklers in the Bronx, perhaps thinking back

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to their role in the White Castle conflagration the previous summer.73 Boycott co-­organizer Bayard Rustin—­who had coordinated the August 1963 March on Washington—­emphasized that the marchers would be nonviolent and would not interfere “verbally or otherwise” with children attending school. More coyly, Galamison, perhaps trying to boost the number of absentees, had acknowledged that “there is always a possibility of violence. Parents might do well to keep their children at home.”74 On the blustery, 20-­degree Monday morning of February 3, nearly half the desks in New York City’s public schools remained empty. Over 464,000 students—­around 45 percent of total enrollment—­remained out of school, with many classrooms in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods close to empty. On a typical day, roughly 10 percent of students (100,000) were absent. Three hundred of the city’s 860 public schools were picketed by 2,600 protestors on that cold winter morning. Later, 3,500 mostly youthful demonstrators marched on Board of Ed headquarters in Brooklyn; others demonstrated in front of Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s midtown office. Some attended Freedom Schools in churches and community centers, with one school welcoming comedian-­activist Dick Gregory as a teacher. Other students simply stayed at home, in solidarity or out of their parents’ fear of violence. No violence was reported. Galamison and Rustin were justifiably proud of the protest they had organized. Rustin deemed the boycott “the greatest demonstration ever of Negro and Puerto Rican unity.”75 Asked to recount his experience of the boycott, Galamison exulted: “You are happy and satisfied knowing you’re on the march for immediate school reforms. You forget your aching feet, aching back, freezing fingers, icy blasts of wind in your face at corners.”76 During the march, he was accompanied by two detectives after receiving numerous threats. Senator Jacob Javits (R-­NY), a long-­time supporter of civil rights, had been skeptical on the eve of the boycott. He had argued that the effectiveness of civil rights demonstrations, “which so impressed the entire nation during the March [on Washington] last August,” will be “threatened” by the New York City boycott, which he deemed “regrettable.”77 Board President Donovan dismissed the boycott as a “fizzle” and “a fraud,” a “highly irresponsible” one at that, while carping that the organizers only proved “how easy it is to get children to take a holiday instead of going to school. They also showed that parents could be frightened into keeping their children at home by a campaign of intimidation and threats of possible violence.”78 He grumbled to

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another reporter: “This silly boycott didn’t accomplish anything. Sure, thousands of kids stayed out of school, but it was like giving them ice cream and candy.” Though concerned and angered that the boycott would cause the city to lose state aid (which was tied to school attendance on specified days, something the boycotters knew), Donovan promised that he wouldn’t shift his stance even “if 100 boycotts are ordered.”79 In effect, Donovan was indicating that the checkpoints to manage integration would remain in place, with physical checkpoints (neighborhood schools) at the elementary level (and to some extent at the junior high level) and meritocracy at the high school level. By 1964, “while Black and Puerto Rican students constituted 34 percent of the total student body in academic high schools in the city, they made up 58 percent of the student body in vocational high schools and 71 percent in special high schools like the ‘600 schools,’ which were designed for delinquent, behaviorally maladjusted, or otherwise at-­risk students. As they had been historically, black students were overrepresented in remedial, nonacademic programs, promising them a lifetime of low-­wage work.”80 Even in the academic high schools, the “academic” and “general” tracks sent students onto starkly different educational and career tracks, as only students in the academic track were qualified for college admittance.81 Reporters unearthed a variety of reactions to the massive boycott. One Bronx high school teacher remarked: “I used to teach in Harlem. I know the conditions there—­the water flowing from the toilets into the halls, the doors hanging by one hinge, the children crowded in classrooms. . . . The only way to improve things there—­and everywhere in the system—­is to integrate and improve all schools.” An individual who walked past pickets professed befuddlement about the protestors’ aims: “They have more freedom in our city than anywhere else. When I went to school they didn’t allow such nonsense.”82 The columnist Jimmy Breslin was infuriated by the boycott, deeming it “perhaps the most damaging single move made by Negro organizations in New York. This school boycott was in complete disregard for the law and for the fact that New York is not Birmingham, Ala., and yesterday did more to alienate black and white, and alienate them when they are young so they can carry it with them forever, than anything that has happened in this city in 25 years.” Given Breslin’s take on the boycott, it came as no surprise that he had nothing kind to say about Reverend Galamison: He “can be dismissed with a few facts. He has his child in a private school. He is a minister of a church in a poor neighborhood, but he drives a Lincoln Continental. And he is in the

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newspapers. He is in the newspapers a lot.” Breslin criticized the minister for wanting “everything done at once”—­despite his years of advocating for school integration—­and being unwilling to accept the board’s plan, “which seemed like a legitimate first effort.”83 Breslin’s viewpoint was common: accept the goal of integration but criticize the pressure tactics employed to make it a reality. New York Post columnist (and former editor) James Wechsler had a different target, Board President James Donovan, whom he criticized for having “utterly failed to grasp the depth of feeling” among the thousands of city residents whose children were receiving a woeful education: “In almost every critical moment that has called for thoughtfulness and understanding, he has exhibited a fatal blend of vanity and shortsightedness.” As for the boycott itself, it “was conducted with quiet dignity, and the city has suffered no irretrievable scars,” perhaps educating some individuals about “the solemnity of the school integration crisis.”84 A Citywide Countermovement Emerges If whites resistant to integration were not scarred by the boycott, they were jolted by it. To this point, white objections to school integration—­or, as they often put it, the destruction of the neighborhood school—­happened on a site-­specific basis, as in Glendale-­Ridgewood. But on March 12, in “pelting snow,” an overwhelmingly white crowd of fifteen thousand marched on City Hall and Board of Ed headquarters to protest virtually every mechanism for integration, including the pairing of schools and busing of children. “Ship cattle, not children” read one sign. “Over my dead body will my kids be bused out” another warned. A third sign appropriated a popular slogan among civil rights protestors: “We shall not be moved.” The rally was sponsored by the Brooklyn Joint Council for Education and the Parents and Taxpayers Association (PAT). Most marchers who were interviewed denied that they opposed integration but said that they objected to busing. (Ironically, many of the protestors were transported to City Hall by two hundred buses.) Demonstration leaders met with Superintendent Gross and Board President Donovan, who told reporters afterward that the board would not alter its integration plans: “Our board responds to logic, not to pressure.” At City Hall, the group decided not to visit Mayor Wagner’s office, as his wife had died the previous week.85 PAT had been formed in September 1963 by parents in Jackson Heights, Queens, after word spread that the board was planning to pair a neighborhood

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elementary school, PS 149, which was 97 percent white, with PS 92, a school six blocks away in Corona with 88 percent Black enrollment. In announcing the launch, PAT counsel Bernard Kessler said the coordinating council had at least fifteen affiliates consisting of new and existing organizations with a combined membership of 275,000 to 300,000. According to the scholar David Rogers, the communities represented in the coordinating council had several attributes in common: “Lower and lower-­middle class, second-­generation white homeowners who lived in fringe areas or in communities with an expanding Negro population.” Jackson Heights PAT said that it opposed “segregated schools” and had received (the small number of) Black students warmly at PS 149 after attendance zones had been altered several years earlier. (Another PAT association had formed in Glendale-­Ridgewood, which had battled one-­way transfers of Black students to their neighborhood schools four years earlier.)86 The Brooklyn Joint Council was a new organization claiming to represent sixty groups and 750,000 Brooklynites. The Times reported that three-­fourths of the twenty-­four city council members it surveyed were opposed to school transfers that involved compulsory busing. It found that a number of local political leaders objected to the depiction of anti-­busing individuals as bigots, arguing that one could support integration while opposing mandatory busing. Left unsaid was that without busing, school integration would be limited to integrated neighborhoods, assuming the anti-­busing contingent also would object to redrawing school zones to increase integration. Utilizing a well-­worn refrain, a Brooklyn council member accused pro-­integration forces of using “intimidation” and engaging in “mob thinking.”87 As with the integration movement, men were often the public spokespeople, but the rank-­and-­file participants were mostly women. A Times profile of one PAT parent reinforced the notion that heartfelt concern for their children, not racism, drove their protest. The reporter took pains to note that Dorothy Limerick Michel, a married mother of six residing in Bushwick, Brooklyn, had no problem with the Black students who had transferred to her kindergartner’s school, and the prior year she had sent her second grader to a public school in largely Black Bedford-­Stuyvesant, since he needed the service of a speech therapist there. However, if she had been required to send him there, “I would have questioned it.” Michel is portrayed as a guileless woman who had not traveled outside the city in the fourteen years since her honeymoon and enjoyed “making

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mosaic pictures by smoothing colored beads over glue on numbered boards.”88 To begrudge her for her views would be mean-­spirited, the story implied. The article emphasized that the Michel family were people of humble means, surviving on the wages earned by Mr. Michel at the bakery warehouse of a supermarket chain. They could not decamp easily to the suburbs. And while many Black and Puerto Rican families felt that the city was doing far too little to improve and integrate city schools, substantial numbers of whites felt the city had already gone too far. These were not the middle-­class white liberals who cordially disputed the methods, though not the concept, of integration, and quietly found other educational options for their children. These were whites who felt that the city was bending over backward to favor Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers at their expense. They would not capitulate meekly or object quietly. Despite the white counter-­protests, the school-­pairing experiment would begin in September 1964. This marked the first time that the board had required the involuntary transfer of white students to predominantly Black and Puerto Rican schools. The school-­pairing concept was known as the Princeton Plan, named after the prosperous New Jersey town that had implemented its main concepts in 1948. As the Wall Street Journal observed in a 1964 article, in the population of 12,000, about 10 or 11 percent of residents were “non-­white.” That percentage had remained stable for many years, negating any fears by white parents that their children would become a numerical minority in their school. The town had an “intellectual complexion” as home to Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. The local high school had been integrated for many years before the town decided to pair its two elementary schools, located a half mile from one another. Students in grades one through five were enrolled in the formerly white school, while older students were assigned to the formerly Black school.89 Given the Journal’s conservative political orientation, readers could easily decode the message behind the reporting. In a small, prosperous town with a Black population that was neither large nor growing, school pairing was reasonable. New York City was a different matter altogether, an enormous city with a sprawling school system, growing racial tension, stark economic divides, transportation issues, constant population shifts within the city, and an exodus of white residents. The New York City Board was aware that it was playing with political dynamite as it tried to manage the dissatisfaction of integrationists and their

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opponents. When it initially announced that it was considering twenty possible pairings, it refused to identify the potential schools involved. After meeting with white middle-­class parents’ associations, district superintendents, and local school boards (often dominated by white middle-­class individuals), the board announced in May that it would pair four sets of white and minority schools in September. The board’s claims that the eliminated white schools had already begun to “tip” racially were not supported by its own data, according to David Rogers. In contrast, the United Parents Association, which described itself as a federation of 430 parent and parent-­teacher associations with 400,000 members, claimed that its members had convinced the board to eliminate a number of proposed pairings because “they were not workable and would not improve integration.”90 PAT was not mollified by the reduction in pairing plans. Rosemary R. Gunning, executive secretary of the PAT Coordinating Council, said her organization was “shocked by this plan,” which “will create chaos and turmoil” and “obviously envisions wholesale involuntary transfers in the future.”91 While small-­scale demonstration projects such as pairing were intended to limit political upheaval, they could also serve to intensify the anger felt by reluctant community members whose schools had been included in the experiment. Selective modification of particular physical checkpoints would not appease individuals on either side of the integration debate. Next Steps for Pro-­Integration Forces The pro-­integration boycott of February 3 surely had felt triumphant to its participants, but the board’s lack of response yielded conflicting views about what should come next. Wait until the following school year to gauge how well pairing and other integration plans were working and whether the board might expand them? Launch another one-­day boycott, or a more sustained one? At least one thing seemed clear: the one-­day display of unity by Blacks and Puerto Ricans needed to be parleyed into a robust coalition fighting for sustained school integration, as support from the growing Puerto Rican community would be crucial to maintain pressure on the board. On March 1, a sunny, 49-­degree Sunday, New Yorkers marched from City Hall, across the Brooklyn Bridge to Board of Education headquarters in the city’s first civil rights demonstration on behalf of Puerto Ricans. “Seven hundred

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thousand Puerto Ricans join hands, here and now, with the Negroes. We, too, are sick and tired of second-­class citizenship, second-­class education housing, second-­class jobs and second-­class everything else! We, too, have fought in all wars for our country. We want and demand respect . . . right here and right now!” Gilberto Gerena Valentín, the executive secretary of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, exhorted the crowd. The city’s deputy commissioner of corrections, Irma Videl Santaella, whose “black Persian lamb pillbox hat” drew a reporter’s mention, insisted in a bilingual speech that “America today is on trial. She must enforce the laws. No good American with dignity can remain neutral in this fight.”92 Reverend Galamison, NAACP state education director Fred Jones, Robert Gore from CORE’s national office, and Brooklyn Urban League director Joe Palmer also addressed the crowd, as did representatives of labor and Jewish organizations. The New York Times estimated that fewer than one-­fourth of the marchers were Black, perhaps a sobering sign in a rally intended to demonstrate Black–­Puerto Rican unity. The Times reported a crowd of around 1,800, well below the 25,000 expected by the organizers, Gerena Valentín’s optimistic estimate of 10,000, or the Amsterdam News’s 6,000 estimate. Marchers carried signs, many in Spanish and English, demanding a Puerto Rican member on the Board of Education and more Puerto Rican teachers. Many ministers heading Pentecostal and storefront churches in Spanish Harlem said they were unaware of the march, with one commenting: “Politics and Christ don’t mix.”93 As for Gerena Valentín, the Times reported that he had a mixed reputation in the Puerto Rican community. Some criticized him for alleged Communist ties (via his union activities in the early 1950s) and for spearheading the Puerto Rican march out of political opportunism. Supporters of Gerena Valentín—­thin, with gray-­flecked black hair and thick glasses—­asserted that he was “truly dedicated” to working on behalf of the Puerto Rican community.94 Members of the East River CORE chapter evidently believed that marches and boycotts failed to sufficiently dramatize the terrible state of education for low-­income New Yorkers. On Friday, March 6, seven CORE members used three cars to block traffic on the southbound Triborough Bridge lanes from Manhattan and the Bronx to Queens. After spreading some garbage and glass on the roadway, they linked arms and sat in front of their cars, causing heavy traffic delays. Other CORE members distributed leaflets to infuriated motorists, who

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learned that the East River chapter was protesting “the unsafe and overcrowded schools in East Harlem. . . . We are asking that New York commuters stop for a moment to look at Harlem and the people they leave behind and that they do something about this problem, that is not only Harlem’s but all America’s.” Police arrested six of the seven protestors.95 A dramatic protest that infuriated weary commuters illustrated one of the quandaries faced by protest groups: is it better to anger potential supporters or be ignored by them? There was no easy answer. Meanwhile, Galamison quickly announced plans for a second school boycott. Last-­minute negotiations yielded no concessions from the Board of Education.96 Logical allies in the integration fight—­white liberals and civil rights groups—­grew increasingly skeptical of both the means and intended ends of the boycott. The National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, a coalition of groups that had strongly supported the first boycott (in which around 90 percent of Puerto Rican students took part), declined to support “Fizzle 2,” as the Citywide Committee had winkingly dubbed it. According to the Herald Tribune, Puerto Rican leaders decided that they were reluctant to get “caught in the middle of the Negro dispute.”97 The Anti-­Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Federation of Teachers, among others, opposed massive transfers of schoolchildren for integration on practical and ideological grounds. Widespread transfers would scatter white children to the suburbs and private schools and might not even benefit poor Black children, they believed. Poor children might be damaged by attending school with privileged children. Moreover, they might require different educational approaches—­not merely equal education but substantially more than their privileged counterparts. Some members of the Citywide Committee believed that Galamison was stomping ahead with boycott number two in the absence of internal agreement and without the planning that went into the first one.98 Moderate elements within the coalition, such as the NAACP’s Fred Jones, felt that bargaining with Mayor Wagner was likely to be more successful than pressuring him and the board. More militant members—­including Galamison, the Parents’ Workshop, the Harlem Parents Committee, and several CORE chapters—­felt that only pressure from the streets would cause the board to make meaningful concessions. The day before the boycott, the Brooklyn minister attempted to spin the fractured coalition to his advantage: “Anybody can make a boycott with 100 percent support. But if

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people can be made to make this one go with all the confusion and division, it’ll really be something. Nobody is in this one but the people.”99 The March 16 boycott, which occurred on a substantially warmer day than the first boycott, resulted in somewhere between 268,000 and 300,000 absences, or about one-­quarter of the school population. The NAACP, CORE’s national office, and the Urban League of Greater New York did not support the boycott, though CORE permitted local chapters to act independently. Whether due to disappointment at the low Black turnout at the rally two weeks prior, the withdrawal of support from Gerena Valentín's group, or a general skepticism about the boycott reprise, substantially fewer Puerto Rican students stayed out of school this time around, with attendance close to normal in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Galamison speculated that absences would have equaled those of the first boycott had Puerto Ricans participated in greater numbers the second time around.100 As it stood, the potential for sustained boycotts in the future seemed gloomy. Around this time, educational activists in a number of other cities—­including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Seattle—­were also launching school boycotts to pressure local boards of education to ramp up the scope and speed of integration efforts.101 The response from school officials was distressingly similar. Puerto Ricans Become Visible In many of the media and historical accounts of the school integration movements, Puerto Ricans enter and exit silently. When the protest movement is depicted as uniformly Black, it is often unclear whether Puerto Ricans are implicitly folded into the Black category or deemed undeserving of consideration altogether. In his sprawling and seminal critique of the New York City Board of Education, published in 1968, David Rogers argues that “a coalition [between Blacks and Puerto Ricans] never developed” and that relations had deteriorated “since the end of the desegregation fight in 1965” as the groups battled for anti-­ poverty funds and jobs in local government. Rogers attributes low Puerto Rican interest in an alliance to several factors, which included the belief that they had been racially integrated in Puerto Rico “and many simply failed to see the point of the Negroes’ fight for desegregation in New York City.” In addition, he contends that many Puerto Ricans wished to distance themselves from the low status of Black residents and that a “deference to authority” was ingrained in their “feudal heritage” on the island. After the February boycott, he says, Puerto Rican groups

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became disinterested in school desegregation: busing did not jibe with their “close family ties” and “the strong protectiveness of many Puerto Rican parents.” It didn’t help, according to Rogers, that only seven hundred Black people took part in the Puerto Rican march, and both Galamison and Rustin showed up late.102 A recent study by Sonia Song-­Ha Lee probes Black–­Puerto Rican relations in New York City more exhaustively. In her interpretation, the possibility of a Black and Puerto Rican coalition in NYC increased after the August 1963 March on Washington. March organizer Bayard Rustin had contacted Manny Diaz, who had helped to turn Mobilization for Youth from a settlement house operation to a locus for Puerto Rican political activism, to encourage Puerto Rican participation. Diaz, aided by his friend Gerena Valentín, brought more than two thousand Puerto Ricans to the march. Gerena Valentín was given a speaking slot, delivering a fifteen-­minute speech in Spanish. According to Lee, “many Puerto Rican leaders believed that [the March] demonstrated Puerto Ricans’ common fate with African Americans as a ‘minority’ group,” rather than an ethnic group following the upward trajectory of European immigrants to America.103 When preparing for the February 1964 boycott, Diaz and Gerena Valentín argued that both Puerto Rican leaders and Black leaders should have veto power over boycott plans. Given that the city’s Black population (as of 1960) was almost double that of the Puerto Rican population (14 percent versus 7.9 percent), and that the Black community had greater political leverage, Puerto Ricans wanted authentic influence in hashing out how the boycott would unfold. Rustin agreed to the veto provision. To assure that neither Galamison nor anyone else would speak for Puerto Ricans, leaders formed the Puerto Rican Parent-­Teacher Association and the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights shortly before the first boycott. The month prior to the boycott, Diaz and his colleague Roland Cintron had written Board of Ed members to assert that the Puerto Rican should no longer be regarded as “a buried statistical appendage to the Negro.”104 Replacing the Puerto Rican groups and other “respectable” organizations in supporting the second boycott were Malcolm X, who that month had declared his independence from the Nation of Islam; the outspoken Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell; and Jesse Gray, who chaired the Harlem Community Council on Housing, which focused primarily on rent strikes. Dick Gregory; Cambridge, Maryland, civil rights leader Gloria Richardson; and leaders of school boycotts in Chicago and Chester, Pennsylvania, also joined the march. Malcolm X

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lambasted New York as having “one of the most hypocritical school systems in the country.” Alluding to the boycotters’ demand for school integration, he explained: “Although I don’t believe in everything that the leaders of the boycott do, and they don’t agree with me on everything, we can submerge our differences on subjects on which we can agree.” Proclaiming himself a fan of “the underdog,” Malcolm proclaimed his support for the boycott leader: “When all the odds makers turned against the Rev. Galamison, that was a sign that he was on the right track.” Powell joined the chorus of praise, calling Galamison “a great new leader of Negroes in our town. This day marks the end of the big-­name civil rights leaders. They boycotted us today and we’re going to boycott them tomorrow.”105 The day of the second boycott, some of these “big-­name” civil rights leaders were in Albany, where the NAACP and CORE sponsored the March for Democratic Schools, attended by a crowd of three thousand. Bayard Rustin, who organized the march, said New Yorkers should insist that Mayor Wagner and Governor Rockefeller, along with the board, negotiate with civil rights forces. Gerena Valentín and A. Philip Randolph were among the speakers. In retrospect, Gerena Valentín’s decision to join Rustin’s Albany march, rather than Galamison’s second school boycott, is puzzling, as he later reflected that the minister always treated Puerto Ricans “as equal partners in the struggle,” while Rustin “always tried to minimize the role of Puerto Rican leaders.” A subsequent meeting between the leaders of the event and Rockefeller produced little of substance.106 “To Placate, To Deceive, To Buy Time” Writing about the late 1950s, Diane Ravitch explained, “The Board of Education, trapped between bitterly conflicting forces, was left to fend for itself,” as Mayor Wagner declined to immerse himself in controversial education issues. “Lacking any clear political mandate from the people, the board fell back on devices calculated to placate, to deceive, to buy time, or just to keep peace. It was a desperate strategy with no hope of victory.”107 She could have just as easily been writing about virtually any other era in board history, especially during those periods when battles over integration were at their height. The dueling school protests in early 1964 left education officials with no apparent strategy to diminish the anger and frustration coming from opposite sides, other than carefully constructed, slightly porous checkpoints that would, it was hoped, appease Black residents, reassure nervous whites, and retain the city’s progressive self-­image.

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Whites aligned with PAT held greater power than those pushing for integration. They had an advantage in raw numbers, an edge that was augmented by their stronger political influence in the city. For the most part, they were calling for a maintenance of the status quo, which was less treacherous politically, less complicated bureaucratically, and considerably less expensive. In this light, the notoriously cumbersome bureaucracy of the Board of Ed worked in PAT’s favor.108 Perhaps most importantly, city and school officials were acutely aware that financially able whites angered by changing school policies could vote with their feet, joining the growing suburban exodus. Each middle-­class white family who relocated to the suburbs chipped away at the city’s tax revenue stream and tilted demographics further in the direction of a school system serving Black and Puerto Rican students, many of them from low-­income families. If good neighborhoods do not “just happen,” neither do segregated schools or neighborhoods. The Board of Ed had no control over the racial composition of neighborhoods, a fact it pointed to repeatedly when justifying its refusal or failure to act more aggressively with respect to school integration. (The board never acknowledged that schools segregated through zoning or site selection also reified the boundaries of segregated neighborhoods.) It also had no control over other city agencies, which often had a list of priorities that superseded school desegregation. Some board members may have been genuinely frustrated with these constraints, but others likely welcomed them as a justification for inaction. As the 1960s wore on, New Yorkers of all stripes would grow increasingly insistent that the excuses and unmet promises of city officials, in the Board of Ed and elsewhere, were unacceptable. Some would continue to protest through organized demonstrations and demands for change through official channels. Others would erupt.

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supposed good faith was diminishing on all sides during the tumultuous year of 1964. Integration supporters were increasingly convinced that voluntary, one-­way integration of Black and Puerto Rican students into predominantly white schools unfairly placed the burden on youth who had already been victimized by educational malpractice. Moreover, voluntary integration was a slingshot in the battle to create a truly integrated, high-­quality education system in NYC. Even the least controversial means of achieving somewhat greater integration—­allowing (mostly Black and Brown) students to transfer from overcrowded schools to more integrated ones with available space—­posed some vexing problems. If the students transferred to nearby, already integrated schools, those schools might “tip” rapidly into newly segregated, overwhelmingly Black and Puerto Rican schools. “Why us?” the receiving-­school parents, mainly white but also sometimes Black, would ask the Board of Ed. If instead the board transferred the students to more distant, overwhelmingly white schools, the parents might question why their children must travel long distances to possibly hostile neighborhoods for a quality education. Parents at the receiving school would wonder why they, rather than parents at a school closer to the students’ homes, should welcome the transfers. Parents in receiving schools resisted being guinea pigs for the school system, but they clearly did not want the Board of Ed to go whole hog in seeking “racial balance” throughout the system. Some white parents feared that even voluntary transfers of Black and Puerto Rican students would damage the quality of the receiving schools. And in the underperforming schools, the transfer of some of their most ambitious and talented students seemed likely to send those schools spiraling further downward. If proponents believed that mandatory, system-­wide transfers for integration were the only solution to the school system’s massive problems, a sizable number of TRUST IN TH E BO A RD ’ S

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white parents would have punched their children’s tickets out of the city’s public schools had this proposal been enacted. When the board found itself unable or unwilling to steer a bold and decisive path addressing difficult educational questions facing New York City’s unimaginably vast school system, it typically created a task force to study the problem. If nothing else, such a move bought it some time, stalling change at an administrative checkpoint. David Rogers observed that the Board of Education has an almost unlimited capacity for absorbing protest and externalizing the blame, for confusing and dividing the opposition, “seeming” to appear responsive to legitimate protest by issuing sophisticated and progressive policy statements that are poorly implemented, if at all, and then pointing to all its paper “accomplishments” over the years as evidence both of good faith and effective performance.1

Kenneth Clark and the Allen Report In May 1964, State Education Commissioner James E. Allen’s Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions released its report Desegregating the Public Schools of New York City, commonly known as the Allen Report. Kenneth Clark, who had been urging the city to take desegregation seriously for a decade, was one of three members of the Advisory Committee. The Board of Ed had requested Allen’s recommendations days after the February 1964 school boycott to protest ongoing segregation in city schools. Diane Ravitch neatly summarized the committee’s estimation of the board’s integration track record as plainly insufficient: “It dismissed Open Enrollment and the Free Choice Transfer policy (too dependent on voluntary choice by Negro and Puerto Rican parents), the school building program (too many schools built in the ghetto), junior high school feeder changes (too limited in impact), and pairing of schools,” which would reduce segregation by only 1 percent if all proposed pairings were effected.2 Most civil rights supporters were heartened by the report’s pointed criticisms of board integration efforts. At the same time, despite Allen’s and Clark’s strong belief in integration, the report was highly pessimistic about the prospects for substantial reductions in racial isolation, whatever the degree of planning undertaken by school authorities or pressure exerted on them. Demographic shifts that brought ever-­rising Black

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and Puerto Rican enrollment, coupled with the residential segregation of these groups in teeming low-­income neighborhoods and the loss of white residents, sharply circumscribed possible integration solutions. Moreover, the panel asserted, any viable integration plan would require acceptance by both whites and minorities and not fuel further white flight.3 Upon the release of the Allen Report, Board President James Donovan, readying for a cruise to Europe with his wife, said that hundreds of millions of dollars would be required from federal, state, and city coffers to integrate schools in the Big Apple. The federal government should pony up a substantial chunk of money, he argued, contending that the city should be not be expected to absorb the costs of the large influx of Black and Puerto Rican families (700,000 combined since World War II) if Miami was not expected to pay the tab for the 200,000 Cuban refugees who had settled in that city. Eight hundred thousand whites had moved out of New York City during that time. “White parents must realize that they will have to stop running,” Donovan warned. “Unless they do, this problem has virtually no solution.”4 The Allen Committee, while cautioning that it is “inaccurate and cruel” to assert that classrooms with no white students cannot be high quality, urged the city to act firmly in eliminating school segregation to the extent possible. “Among all the great cities of the North,” the panel proclaimed, “New York’s public schools stand a better social chance of achieving authentic desegregation than possibly any of the others,” citing “a heritage of cultural innovation and educational progress” and the lack of backlash against civil rights efforts. The latter was a perplexing statement, given the large anti-­integration rallies that had occurred months before the report’s release. The report stated plainly: “If school segregation cannot be fought effectively here, if the public school children of New York City must be relegated to second class status for lack of energy and effort, the nation will have reason to despair.”5 This proclamation would prove prescient. The panel’s most notable recommendation was to resequence elementary, junior high, and high school education from a 6-­3-­3 plan to a 4-­4-­4 plan. In plain language, the proposal meant that students would enter junior high two years earlier than previously and would presumably experience more integrated school environments, since neighborhood elementary schools were often highly segregated. However, as Jeremy Larner observed in January 1967, the 200 new

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intermediate schools that would be needed to replace the 140 junior highs would serve smaller geographic areas and thus might be more segregated than before. The 4-­4-­4 plan, Larner adjudged, was “the most celebrated and expensive non-­ solution to the integration problem” proposed in the Allen Report.6 Indeed, the board implemented the 4-­4-­4 plan in a very small number of mostly segregated schools before ending transfers of ninth grade students to high schools and continuing its construction of segregated intermediate schools in 1967. Similarly, the board agreed with the Allen recommendations that high schools should become comprehensive, rather than bifurcated into vocational and academic ones (which increased segregation). By 1967, the superintendent asked the board to abandon its comprehensive high school plan. As Annie Stein explains, “The whole agitation for the comprehensive high school to eliminate the segregated, antiquated and expensive vocational schools had been turned into its opposite—­the enlargement and enrichment of the predominantly white elite academic schools.”7 A longer-­term approach to integration also recommended by the panel, the creation of vast educational complexes to serve students from a wide geographic swath, would have proven the most expensive and far-­reaching approach to integration, if it had been attempted on more than the constricted basis that it eventually was. The report also called for complete equalization of facilities in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods and enhanced recruitment of minority teachers and other personnel.8 Those two recommendations in particular seemed achievable, but like recommendations in so many previous (and future) reports, they languished in office files or were implemented on a piecemeal basis before being abandoned quickly. A new study could always be authorized. The board would continue to employ administrative checkpoints to retain the status quo. In confronting the problems of educational inequality, New York City was far from alone among big cities. In fact, according to the Allen Report, school segregation was less severe in New York than in other large cities. From 1958 to 1963, the white percentage of students in public elementary schools had declined from 62 to 51 percent. Whites made up less than a quarter of public elementary students in Manhattan, half in Brooklyn, 42 percent in the Bronx, 77 percent in Queens, and 89 percent in Richmond (Staten Island). Using a generous definition of desegregated schools—­those that were 10 to 90 percent Black and Puerto Rican—­the Allen Committee reported that 44 percent of elementary schools, 59

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percent of junior highs, and 67 percent of high schools met this criterion. At all three levels, the number of “segregated white” schools (over 90 percent white) exceeded the number of “segregated Negro and Puerto Rican” schools (over 90 percent Black and Puerto Rican). At the high school level, only one segregated Black and Puerto Rican school existed, and that one, Girls’ High School in Brooklyn, was slated to close. Of the twenty-­eight other high schools in that borough, ten were segregated white. This was rather surprising, given that the public school population there, at least at the elementary level, was half Black.9 Beneath these broad-­brush statistics, the data was more troubling. In his widely read Dark Ghetto (1965), Kenneth Clark noted that only two of Harlem’s twenty elementary schools had Black enrollments under 89.9 percent. (As was often the case during this era, it was unclear how, or if, Puerto Ricans were being counted in the statistics.) All four junior high schools had over 91 percent Black enrollments. No high schools operated within Harlem’s borders.10 In the autumn before the release of the Allen Report, Clark had concluded that the inadequacy of Harlem schools was so pressing that improving education there had to be the main focus, even if that meant delaying desegregation. “If I were a white parent, I would not want my child to attend these schools. I can’t see how anyone can expect Negro parents to send their children to them.” Voluntary transfers of students from segregated schools to more integrated ones were mere “tinkering,” he believed, since they did nothing for the substantially greater number of students stuck in failing schools.11 Triage would not be sufficient. Yet, in Dark Ghetto, Clark viewed Black boycotts calling for immediate desegregation fatalistically, given the “timidity and moral irresolution of whites,” who could easily kill mandatory integration with a countermovement of their own, undergirded by threats to exit the public schools.12 At this time, 30 percent of white and 10 percent of Black students were enrolled in nonpublic schools. Without the creation of quality education, integration was a dead letter. Though Clark’s belief in integration would be as long-­standing and unwavering as any public figure’s, he refuted claims that demands for exemplary ghetto education constituted a capitulation to segregation. Because far-­reaching integration was impossible, the goal must be to “save as many Negro children as possible now.” Children, Black or white, “must not be sacrificed on the altar of ideological and semantic rigidities,” he warned.13 Black students in Harlem were clearly being sacrificed. As their school

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careers unfolded, they fell further and further behind their peers in New York City and the nation in reading and math achievement: in the third grade, one year behind their city peers; in sixth grade, nearly two years; and in eighth grade, almost two and one-­half years—­and three years behind students nationally. Summarizing the existing evidence, Clark concluded that “fewer than half of the ghetto youth seem likely, as matters now stand, to graduate from high school. And few of them are prepared for any job; fewer still will go on to college.”14 Physical checkpoints in the early years made subsequent meritocratic checkpoints self-­enforcing. Clark did not place great faith in the effectiveness of protest to forge change in school policies. He sharply criticized local leaders, sometimes self-­appointed, “who often do not have responsibility for the burdens of a complex organization, [and thus] can assume postures of militance and make flamboyant statements which appeal to the crowd without regard to whether the statements lead to change.” Not having to bother themselves with planning, strategy, and the like, “it is enough that they have an arsenal of words and are adept at name-­calling and are ruthless in their ability to ascribe nefarious motives to anyone who disagrees with them. The most successful of these wildcat civil rights leaders use the technique of demagogic intimidation of the more responsible civil rights leaders.”15 One might guess that Clark had Malcolm X in mind. However, Clark often spoke warmly about the former Malcolm Little. In 1976, Clark remembered: “Up until Malcolm’s death, we were quiet, understanding friends, and I’m not sure that the word ‘friend’ is the precise word here, but there was a quality of mutual respect and understanding, even with disagreements.”16 Malcolm had accepted the invitation of Clark’s son Hilton to speak with students at his elite and very white Connecticut prep school (Kent School). When the elder Clark would invite Malcolm to speak to his classes at the City College of New York, “all that stuff about ‘Whitey’ disappeared, because there’d be only one or two black youngsters in my class, and Malcolm would . . . embrace the students psychologically. He was a very empathic man. You would never know it by some of the extreme things he said. You know, he was trying to shake people up.” Clark also recollected that he and Malcolm would discuss the “division of labor” in the civil rights movement: “He knew that he had a difficult role to play, which would complement the kind of role that more ‘respected’ civil rights leaders played.”17

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Summer Heat In spring 1964, representatives of various civil rights organizations attempted to heal the fractures that had developed over matters of strategy and leadership. That April, Schools Superintendent Calvin Gross had conveyed a willingness to negotiate with civil rights groups in secret. His plan for educational reform, which involved pairings of four sets of schools and rezoning attendance areas for three junior high schools, did not impress many local civil rights leaders, though the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins supported Gross’s plan. Intensive negotiations between Gross, the civil rights negotiating team, and board staff produced glimmers of optimism, but by October progress had ground to a halt.18 Not coincidentally, the power of the white anti-­integration movement, led by PAT, was building. Only six months separated the school protests of early 1964 and the September start of the new school year, but the racial turbulence that would unfold during that time reverberated for decades. The summer school vacation offered little respite from the potent tensions swirling in the increasingly polluted air of New York City. President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were aware of the potential for trouble, identifying New York and Mississippi as the most likely sites of racial violence that summer.19 They would be proven tragically correct. In Mississippi, three civil rights workers had disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21; six weeks later, the FBI discovered the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (the latter two of whom were New Yorkers) in an earthen dam. Four days earlier, Brooklyn minister Milton Galamison, the most prominent activist for school integration in New York City, had sat down with the writer Robert Penn Warren, who was conducting an oral history project on the civil rights movement. Like many Black activists in the North, the Presbyterian clergyman had grown increasingly skeptical of the commitment of white liberals to racial justice in their own backyards: I think for the first time in many years, whites in the North are actually confronted with the problem that they tried to pretend only existed in the South, and that many whites have been able to call themselves liberal because they would send money to Mississippi. And if there’s a school integration effort in Alabama, it appears in the newspaper that the negroes in Alabama are struggling for equality. If there’s a school struggle here in New York City . . . the New

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York City newspapers print that some irresponsible leaders are trying  to get publicity. You see, there’s a distinction when the battle gets nearer to home.

He observed that “there are many tricks and evasions being exercised constantly in the North to which the South may resort. That’s why it behooves us in the North to clear up these discrepancies as quickly as possible. We owe it to our Southern brethren rather than pretend that all is well here, and everything is wrong there.”20 The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, enshrined the distinction between Southern (de jure) and Northern (de facto) forms of school segregation. During House consideration of the legislation, Florida Republican William Cramer had introduced an amendment to the law’s original definition of school desegregation as “the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin.” Cramer’s amendment stipulated that “‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” Emanuel Celler, the liberal Brooklyn representative who headed the subcommittee where the amendment was introduced, accepted the amendment without debate. Thus, school districts that had not been segregated by law were protected from mandated desegregation, unless litigants or federal agencies could prove that school segregation in those locales was caused by deliberate governmental action.21 On July 16, 1964, two weeks after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the big national news was right-­wing Senator Barry Goldwater’s acceptance, in San Francisco, of the Republican nomination for president. Goldwater thundered: “Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens.” History teaches us that “nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.”22 Earlier that day, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a white plainclothes police officer shot a considerably smaller Black teenager to death. The officer, Thomas Gilligan, claimed that the fifteen-­year-­old James Powell had lunged toward him with a knife, an allegation that was never proven. Powell, who lived in the Bronx, had been attending summer school at a nearby junior high on the Upper East Side.23 Three hundred upset and angry students,

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joined by others in the area, confronted the seventy-­five police officers who provided backup as Gilligan was whisked away. Although some threw rocks, bottles, and other projectiles in the direction of the police, there were no direct physical confrontations, and the police made no arrests. The next day, a demonstration organized by CORE drew around two hundred protestors, including a large number of students, demanding a civilian review board for alleged police misconduct. Approximately fifty police officers were on hand. Violence again was averted, but that would not long be the case.24 July 18 was a Saturday, and the weather was hot. Nevertheless, order prevailed at James Powell’s funeral service and at a subsequent CORE protest, which originally had been organized around the continued search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi but inevitably turned to police brutality in New York City. A group of around 250 marched to the headquarters of the 28th Police Precinct on 8th Avenue and West 123rd Street in Harlem, clamoring for the department to suspend Gilligan immediately. About twenty-­five police officers and protestors squared off. Fourteen were arrested. Bottles began raining from rooftops. Two hours before midnight, the streets seemed on the verge of explosion. As Saturday turned to Sunday, gunfire, bricks, and bottles filled the air.25 A Black sergeant told his ten-­man platoon, half Black and half white, to “be extra careful. You’re gonna be called a whole lot of names and you’re gonna be provoked. I want you to lean over backward. But if anybody puts his hands on you, crack his skull. Try to do this thing peacefully, but if you have to, go hard.” A bar owner asked his friend, Amsterdam News reporter George Barker, what had caused the chaos. “They say it’s about that boy being killed by the white cop in Yorkville,” Barker answered. The barman shot back, “Well, why don’t they riot in Yorkville?”26 One report offered a vivid description of the scene at dawn: “The sun illuminated a ghastly scene of broken windows; ransacked stores; streets littered with broken glass, rubbish, and empty cartridges; crowds of sullen Negroes; and tired policemen, semimilitary in their helmets.” The iron gates that stores used for security during nonbusiness hours lay twisted on sidewalks.27 After more disruptions on Sunday night, the official tallies told a blunt story: 108 arrests, 45 damaged or looted stores, 27 police officers and 93 civilians injured; local hospitals reported treating at least double that count of civilians. As the sun descended on Monday, July 20, disorder returned. By 11:00, police and firefighters zoomed from one alarm to the next, many of them false. (Harlem

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had been blocked off from vehicular traffic, so the drivers had to look out for pedestrians and projectiles, but not civilian cars.) Within a couple of hours, however, Harlem began to cool down. In Brooklyn, Bedford-­Stuyvesant was heating up. By 1964, Bed-­Stuy, the center of the Black population in Brooklyn, was home to fifty thousand public-­ housing residents in nine buildings. The overall neighborhood population was at least 83 percent Black and Puerto Rican by 1960, and schools there were segregated, lacking in quality, and often run on split sessions, resulting in reduced instructional time.28 CORE’s Brooklyn branch held a lengthy meeting to plot a response to the killing of James Powell. When the meeting finally adjourned around 12:30 at night, a group of roughly one hundred—­a sizable number of whom were white—­staged a four-­block march chanting “Killer cops must go.” Four hundred sympathizers joined the march, which concluded at Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street. According to the Amsterdam News, “the crowd gathered as Black Nationalists made their speeches as they were accustomed to do at the corner. Police reported that everything was orderly when the meeting broke up about 1:30 a.m.” Then, a police official alleged, the violence “started for no reason.” By this time, the crowd was more than eight hundred strong, and forty police officers were on the scene. They did not fire their guns but responded to lobs of bottles and rocks by charging at the crowd with their nightsticks. An unmarked police car was set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail. The following night, Tuesday, July 21, brought looting at hundreds of stores—­somewhere between two hundred and five hundred. Fifty people were arrested. Two looters were shot nonfatally by police, and one officer suffered injuries. The “rampage,” as the Amsterdam News described it, encompassed a sixteen-­block radius that stretched north to DeKalb Avenue and east to Ralph Avenue.29 Mayor Wagner cut short a business trip to Switzerland in the wake of the commotion. His pleas on July 22 for an end to the four days of disturbances seemed to reflect a scant understanding of the grievances that had provided the tinder for the disorder. “Law and order are the Negro’s best friend—­make no mistake about that,” he intoned. “The opposite of law and order is mob rule, the way of the Ku Klux Klan and the lynch mob.” Ongoing disorders could retard Black progress and civil rights initiatives for “half a century,” he warned. Constance Baker Motley, the only Black member of the state senate, said the possible influence of Communists in fomenting the riots—­something Wagner

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hinted at obliquely—­was a marginal issue. The main causes were “privation and despair,” she explained.30 Less than a half hour after Wagner concluded his plea, rioting and looting resumed in Bed-­Stuy. Wednesday night saw fewer stores broken into—­the list of untouched targets was dwindling—­but three more looters shot by police. No one was killed.31 All told, the chaos had lasted six days in two neighborhoods, with substantial looting and some arson. One person had been killed in addition to James Powell, whose death had ignited the conflagration. Approximately 150 people had been injured; arrests amounted to 550 people or fewer. Some pointed out that the human toll could have been far worse, if not for the city’s ability to close subway stations as a means of limiting crowds and damage.32 Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was also in Switzerland when the disorder first began, returned to Harlem on July 21 and voiced outrage at the NYPD, deeming it “the most irresponsible police force in the nation. The police methods in Harlem are in direct contrast to the southern methods used in Mississippi and other parts of the South where they do not use live ammunition. There has been no use of water hoses, no tear gas in Harlem.” Powell denied that this was “a race riot. The black man is mad, mad with continued police brutality of white policemen. He’s been mad as far as I can remember.”33 At the mayor’s invitation, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to New York to discuss the riots with Wagner on July 27. Some local Black leaders were incensed that the mayor had brought in an outsider rather than consulting them and that King had only minimally touched base with them. Powell assailed Wagner as “totally and completely wrong” for inviting King, who “had no business coming in. . . . He was used by the white power structure to try to advise us. No leader outside of Harlem should come into this town and tell us what to do.” Bayard Rustin, who served as a liaison between local leaders and King, did not help matters by telling Harlem leaders that King lacked sophistication and eschewed conflict, while dismissing the leaders as “crackpots” when speaking with King.34 After meeting with Wagner four times in five days, King came away with no firm commitments from the mayor, who rejected King’s calls for the creation of a civilian review board and the suspension of Officer Gilligan. While in New York, King, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, and the Negro American Labor Council’s A. Philip Randolph announced that they were supporting President Johnson’s call for a halt to public demonstrations—­or

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at least “a broad curtailment, if not total moratorium”—­until the November presidential election. The fear was that further protests would send angry or fearful whites into the arms of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s John Lewis and CORE’s James Farmer had cautioned that such a moratorium would fuel the tendency of opponents to conflate nonviolent protest and urban uprisings as “Negro trouble.” Malcolm X weighed in from Cairo, Egypt, saying the civil rights leaders who agreed to the halt in protests “have sold themselves out [to] become campaign managers” in the Black community for Johnson. Following his visit, King found himself more optimistic about progress in the South than in the North, observing that Northern cities were “potentially more explosive” than any Southern locales.35 The uprisings in Harlem and Bedford-­Stuyvesant (as well as upstate in Rochester) suggested that many African Americans in the North had little faith that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would ease their daily struggle with racism when looking for a home, trying to find a job, or securing a decent education for their children. Time reported that white “Southerners were bitterly pleased that the North was at last getting a taste of racial woe.” Arkansas governor Orval Faubus held up newspaper reports of disorder in New York, blaring incredulously, “This is New York City and New York State, and this is the state where people point their finger at Arkansas and [Mississippi] and send beatniks down here to try to tell us how to solve our problems!”36 Earlier in 1964, remarking on unapologetic white resistance to school pairings in Queens, Rabbi Myron Fenster had concluded: “What the whites are saying is ‘If the whole society is rotten, why start with me? I don’t want to take the first step. I want to take the last step.’”37 Before they considered taking those steps, many white parents likely felt that ghetto schools would have to be transformed and ghetto children would have to learn to act “properly.” White parents proved far more willing to decamp to the white suburbs. The tumult in July surely did not increase the enthusiasm of many whites to have their children rub shoulders with low-­income Black youth. Kenneth Clark hoped that white liberals would be moved to make greater efforts on behalf of the Black poor but realized that direct appeals to the conscience of whites alone would not bring about said result. Moral suasion, he declared, must be welded to the notion that continued Black oppression would not only hurt whites but could expose them to grave danger. “The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology” that is “chronic” and “self-­perpetuating,” he warned, citing alarming rates of emotional

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illness, homicide, delinquency, and drug addiction in Harlem. Attempts to confine “the spread of its contagion” to its borders are “futile,” Clark alleged.38 White flight to mono-­racial suburban enclaves was “a temporary stopgap only,” given the desire of middle-­class Black families to escape ghetto environments, as well as increased pressure for open housing and school desegregation, the latter already occurring in a number of NYC suburbs (including Orange and Teaneck in New Jersey, and New Rochelle and Malverne in New York).39 Clark’s argument did not resonate. There were still many suburbs with nary a Black face, and in the ensuing decades many would remain largely that way. (Others would later experience growing Asian and Latino populations, but such changes seemed to provoke less dismay than increasing Black populations.) After all, whites had benefited, and continued to benefit, from segregation in its various forms, providing them greater access to desired neighborhoods, jobs, and schools. Scattering so-­called ghetto pathologies to white city neighborhoods and suburbs in the hopes that they would come in low-­enough dosages to be rendered harmless was a theory most whites were not prepared to test. Many of those who chose to stay in New York City, by choice or lack of alternatives, were resolutely unwilling to have their children exposed to the social ills of the ghetto in the name of school integration. White Backlash Intensifies On September 13, the first day of the 1964–­65 school year, nearly 276,000 students—­overwhelmingly white—­stayed home from school to protest pairing plans involving slightly over 2,300 students at four sets of elementary schools: three in Queens and one in Brooklyn. The growing Parents and Taxpayers, along with another parents’ group, the Joint Council for Better Education, had organized the boycott. Student attendance in Harlem’s primarily Black schools was normal. Pickets, with signs featuring messages such as “Civil Rights for All—­Not Forced Busing,” appeared at around 150 schools. Mayor Wagner continued to deflect any personal responsibility to the Board of Education. The boycott continued for a second day with 233,000 seats left empty in the city’s public schools, about 13 percent above normal. “Thank God, it’s the last day,” sighed one Bronx housewife. “I hope we don’t have to do this again.”40 Board President James Donovan recommended that city attorneys investigate whether organizers had committed criminal offenses in arranging the boycott;

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future educational boycotts, irrespective of the initiators, should be outlawed, he insisted. While the fiery Donovan had downplayed the February 1964 pro-­ integration boycott as a “fizzle,” here he was seven months later contending that the “new weapon” of school boycotts constituted “at minimum a conspiracy to disrupt public education and, at a maximum, a conspiracy to destroy it.” He pleaded for “some standards of decency. . . . Even in World War II poison gas and germ warfare were avoided by all.” Superintendent Gross complained that a continuation of the boycott would result in a loss of up to $2.2 million in future state aid, which was tied to attendance figures during specified periods. He condemned boycotts as “a preposterous kind of numbers game to see who can damage children’s education the most.”41 In the most extreme cases, the boycott produced a school day without students. In solidly white Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, at an elementary school that was not impacted by the integration plan, a single student showed up; the student’s 474 classmates all stayed home, their parents fearing that their children would eventually be swept up in integration plans. In the paired schools, absences ranged from 18 percent in Brooklyn Heights to around two-­thirds in Jackson Heights–­Corona (Queens). While the current boycotts were attempts to convince the board to roll back its limited integration efforts, Reverend Galamison raised the prospect of a new pro-­integration boycott.42 The PAT parents in Jackson Heights were unable to stop the pairing experiment, but they did not concede. Under the pairing plan, all first and second graders were assigned to PS 92, while students in the upper grades were assigned to PS 149. Rather than sending their children to the Corona school (PS 92), a group of parents, under PAT auspices, created a private school, evidently the first in the North designed to avoid integration. The following week, parents of sixty-­five first and second graders escorted these children and some of their younger siblings into PS 149, which they continued to regard as their rightful neighborhood school, over the protest of the school principal. They occupied two classrooms regularly used for remedial reading and television instruction. Board threats that parents would be subject to arrest if the sit-­in stretched into a third day brought defiance. Bernard Kessler, lawyer for the private school and the Jackson Heights branch of PAT, vowed that the families would return: “The mothers will have younger children with them, with their bottles, diapers and strollers, ready to be taken away in the event of arrest.”43 Local PAT president

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Joan Addabbo told reporters that the children were being tutored after school hours: “They wouldn’t be learning at PS 92 anyway. They might as well not be learning closer to home.”44 Addabbo seemed to suggest that white students were incapable of learning in a “Black” school. By her logic, the same would be true for Black and Puerto Rican students, but this was clearly not her concern. A profile of Addabbo in the Times, entitled “Mother with a Cause,” echoed some of the themes in its earlier portrait of Dorothy Limerick Michel (discussed in chapter 3). The married mother of two had attended parochial schools with Black classmates and, in her account, had Black friends. Like Michel, Addabbo said that Black children had been welcomed to PS 149. She was a humble woman of modest means whose only ambition was “to be a good mother.” She was married to her childhood sweetheart, a TV repairman. Reinforcing her professed colorblindness, she asserted that “no mother, white or Negro, wants her child away from her.”45 As Elizabeth Gillespie McRae elucidates, white women who fought to preserve segregation throughout the US typically “capitalized on their identities as mothers” to make the case for “colorblind” racial separation. Segregationist white women resided not only in the Deep South. “By leaving segregationists sequestered in the South,” McRae declares, “scholars and policy makers have attenuated massive resistance to its narrowest thread—­absolute school segregation—­and ignored the political flexibility of segregationists and the diverse strategies they employed.” Indeed, on both sides of the school integration conflict, women represented the preponderance of people demanding or resisting change on the ground, while men typically served as the public voices.46 In Jackson Heights, parents brought in outside reinforcements. They descended upon PS 149 for the third consecutive day, this time joined outside the school by PAT members from elsewhere in the city, bringing the crowd to more than three hundred. Thomas Nevins, a deputy of Superintendent Gross, stood in the doorway of the school building along with a sizable phalanx of police officers. Eventually, the protestors gained entry and were led into the auditorium. Nevins introduced himself and offered a final chance for the protestors to leave without being arrested; boos and jeers enveloped him. Police began to fill out blue and white arrest cards, charging the protestors, many with children in tow, with loitering on school premises, punishable by up to sixty days in jail. They were released in their own custody. One parent was alleged to have struck a police officer and resisted arrest, drawing a felonious assault charge. Superintendent

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Gross, who ordered the arrests, characterized them as a “purely defensive” response to benefit the children who were attending school lawfully. As the individuals in the auditorium were being arrested, an angry crowd spilled into the street, yelling and blocking police vans with baby carriages. The tire of a police van was flattened. PAT supporters opened its hood and tried to pull the wires from its engine. At the courthouse, arrested parents and their children were offered coffee, milk, and sandwiches as the complaints against them were typed. One departing mother pointed at Nevins and told her young son, “When you see that man, spit at him.”47 Under the pairing plan, the white proportion of PS 149 students was expected to decline from 87 to 75 percent; at PS 92, the white proportion was expected to rise from virtually nil—­2 students, or 0.4 percent—­to 53 percent. At the end of October, the actual white proportion at PS 92 was 41 percent, the result of around one hundred students assigned to that school not attending. PS 149 attendance was close to expected. Evidently, white parents were fighting not to maintain 100 percent segregation but to ensure that their children were the dominant racial population in the schools they attended.48 Another New York Times Magazine profile of PAT parents revealed a keen sensitivity to accusations of racism.49 A PAT official, June Reynolds, insisted that members of the group supported Open Enrollment, as well as the right of Black students who resided in the attendance zone to enroll in neighborhood schools. However, she added, “nobody has a right to send our children away from our neighborhood.” In the case of the Jackson Heights pairing, the six-­block distance between the two paired schools cast doubt on her claim. More significantly, the supposition that Black children living in the neighborhood would be welcome in local schools ignored a stark reality: many Jackson Heights residents didn’t want Black families in the neighborhood. Indeed, they feared that pairing would prompt greater movement into the neighborhood. An elderly woman in a different part of Queens worried that Black students attending her neighborhood schools would result in Black families moving in, and then her $16,000 home “won’t be worth a cent.” Reynolds, described as a “young, fresh-­faced, bright-­eyed, dedicated dynamo,” said if she were Black, she would move into an interracial neighborhood. She “wouldn’t live in Harlem for anything in the world.” Blacks who did so, she said, lived in Harlem because they “liked it there” and were not willing to work

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hard enough to move to a better neighborhood. Another woman did not want her ten-­year-­old boy to go to school in a Black neighborhood: “What if there’s a riot, like there was in Harlem? And what if he goes into a drugstore and some of the older kids give him a jelly apple with dope in it?” Several interviewees opined that increasing Black enrollments in “white” schools would result in declining moral and educational standards. One local mother denied that she had “a moral obligation to anyone,” save perhaps her husband and child. A local priest had a similar take on his parishioners, observing that “many of them have worked their way out of real poverty and in the process haven’t had much time or inclination” to examine why many Black families had been unable to escape poverty as they had.50 These prototypically American expressions of individualism highlighted the rocky political terrain upon which school reforms of virtually any kind rested. While many parents of all backgrounds had some level of dissatisfaction with the status quo, few were prepared to accept any changes for the “greater good” if that meant putting their children at any perceived risk, whether morally, educationally, or bodily. The Limits of White Racial Liberalism The initially good-­willed pairing of two schools in Brooklyn Heights, where anti-­ integration groups had gained little traction, may have been a more ominous sign of integration quandaries than in Jackson Heights. In spring 1964, white parents in affluent Brooklyn Heights voted by a two-­to-­one margin to pair “their” school, PS 8, with nearby PS 7, which served an overwhelmingly Black and Puerto Rican student body who lived in the Farragut Houses, a low-­income public housing development. The schools stood only three-­tenths of a mile from one another. The city encouraged the endeavor by improving PS 7’s physical plant and pumping $150,000 into the consolidated schools for additional library books and teaching services. Children were slated to attend PS 8 from grades one through four, and PS 7 for the final two years of elementary school. A single principal oversaw both schools, which were treated administratively as a single school. When the consolidated school was launched in fall 1964, there were 358 white students among the 923-­member student body. In the October 31, 1964, student count, PS 8 was 42 percent white, and PS 7, 23 percent white. The figures indicated that white enrollment had dropped to 324. By the next year, white enrollment was down to 251, with more departing in 1966. One parent, an attorney who had

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been strongly in favor of pairing, sent his daughter to private school after the first year. He blamed the Board of Ed for failing to maintain the high educational standards of PS 8. A Wall Street Journal article on the pairing quotes investment banker Robert Rubin, evidently the same person who would go on to lead the Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton. He accused school authorities of preparing insufficiently for more children who needed “educational assistance,” taking pains to say that the school’s educational quality began to decline “not because [they] were Negroes, but because a lot more children who required educational assistance were in the school, and they happened to be Negro.” In remarks that could have come from any number of white liberals, Rubin sighed: “At some point you finally decide you aren’t going to make your children suffer for your hopes or ideals of what’s right.”51 Reporter Felix Kessler captured the sad reality of the situation: “If parents in Brooklyn Heights showed a remarkable readiness to accept pairing initially, they now have exhibited an equally quick turn-­about in transferring their children to private schools.” Many of the pairing deserters enrolled their children at the newly opened St. Ann’s School, which developed into one of the most elite and well-­regarded private schools in the nation.52 (Recent estimates peg the St. Ann’s student population as 3 percent Hispanic, 9 percent Black, 8 percent Asian, and 75 percent white, in a borough where the public school population is 28 percent Hispanic, 37 percent Black, 16 percent Asian, and 17 percent white.53) Nevertheless, after the first year of pairing, the Times painted a generally sunny portrait of the experiment, with several teachers and administrators noting that the infusion of funding to the paired schools, nearly $400,000 in total, had improved the educational environment by reducing class sizes, adding teachers, and enabling the creation of after-­school programs. Parents had mixed reactions. A story published near the end of 1966 suggested cloudier skies. On the bright side, the Board of Ed reported that students at all eight of the schools in question had made substantial improvements in reading scores on standardized tests, with white students making the largest gains. Of concern were the attrition rates of white students from the paired schools. In the first year, over one-­third (35.5 percent) of white students had departed; one-­quarter of white students left the following year. In the two years, the Black “discharge rate” was between 14 and 15 percent. Systemwide, that annual rate was about 12 percent. Around 1,000 of the 5,600 students in the paired schools were bused. Though the existing school

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pairings encompassed fewer than six of every thousand students in the city’s public schools, the board had no plans to expand the program. Pairing constituted yet another example of the board teasing bold initiatives, rolling them out on a limited basis, and later deciding that the initiative would not be expanded.54 Opposition to pairing and other integration plans were not, at their core, rooted in white allegiance to the neighborhood school. After all, at the time of the PAT revolt in Queens, four hundred thousand New York City students attended private or parochial schools that typically required travel outside of their neighborhoods. The issue was the destination, not the transportation. If the destination was a Black and Puerto Rican school in a low-­income neighborhood, white parents clung to the neighborhood-­school concept with white-­knuckled fear. Some Black parents who considered sending their children to schools in white neighborhoods, which might be hostile to the new students, must have felt similarly.55 To be fair, the board faced a knotty problem in deciding which schools should be the focus of enhanced integration efforts. If they targeted schools in “fringe” neighborhoods, near both Black and white populations, a white exodus might ensue. If instead the board skipped over fringe areas to send children to overwhelmingly white schools and neighborhoods, the Black and Brown students involved would face increased travel times and perhaps intensified antagonism in their new schools. It was far more expedient to make token efforts in lieu of attempting to transform the school system. Popular resistance to pairing was sobering. A September 1964 survey by the Times, aimed at gauging the extent of “white backlash” in New York, found that four of five whites surveyed were opposed to the board’s pairing plan; of these opponents, 45 percent said they would enroll their children in private schools rather than allowing them to be transferred to a paired school.56 A Times survey earlier in the summer, referenced in the September article, had found Black parents almost evenly split on the pairing plan. The fall survey results provide a complex portrait of white New Yorkers circa 1964. Over half felt the civil rights movement was moving too rapidly; about one in ten said it was moving too slowly. Nearly half felt that nonviolent demonstrations had hurt the Black cause, while over nine in ten felt that the uprisings earlier in the summer had. Nearly all respondents—­97 percent—­had never taken part in a civil rights demonstration. White New Yorkers reported a revealing combination of proximity to and distance from Black residents. Fifty-­seven percent said they had had Black

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schoolmates, and 42 percent said their neighborhoods included Black residents. But while 70 percent knew Black people by name, only 7 percent said they knew a Black person well enough to be friendly with him or her. Fifty-­seven percent said they would not have any concerns if one or two Black families moved into their neighborhood, while another 25 percent said they would have no concerns if their new neighbors were “nice.” A number of respondents felt unnerved by Black New Yorkers. A Manhattan woman in her forties expressed unease with Black men drinking on front stoops in her neighborhood: “Now we feel like the Southerners do. We’re afraid.” A woman in Flushing, Queens, pregnant with her third child, conceded that Black people should have equal rights but blanched at the idea of her children playing with them or eventually marrying them. Articulating the self-­fulfilling prophecy that resulted in neighborhood racial transition, she lamented that “it never stays just one or two Negro families. White people panic and move out. Ghettoes form.” Despite the requisite insistence that she was free of prejudice, an older woman in Manhattan admitted that “I don’t care for the n—­—­s. . . . I wouldn’t mind if they behaved themselves.” A sixty-­one-­year-­old housewife alluded, probably unwittingly, to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man when she confessed: “When I see them, I make believe I don’t see.” And a young musician on the Upper West Side shared the most poignant observation: “I think I’m prejudiced. I see myself as a poisoned product of this era.”57 Proactive White Integrationists There were groups of white parents—­not a large number, to be sure—­who were proactive in their support of school integration. In August 1964, Ellen Lurie, representing the group EQUAL, strongly denounced the impending anti-­integration boycotts. EQUAL (not an acronym), formed that spring, was a primarily white organization that fiercely advocated for integration and other issues related to school justice. At the time, Lurie said EQUAL served thirty-­five local neighborhood groups and had a mailing list of five thousand community leaders. “The PAT call for a boycott doesn’t fool us. Theirs is a boycott for privilege—­not for rights. They are afraid of what tomorrow may bring and they want to do everything they can to ‘preserve their neighborhoods,’ which really means ‘keep the Negro in his place.’” EQUAL, often depicted as militant, would go on to work

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alongside other civil rights organizations in fighting for integration and equality in the schools, and later community control, but never gained a sizable following. Lurie and her husband lived with their five children in Washington Heights (Manhattan), blocks from the Hudson River near 185th Street. Two of their children took a bus each day to Harlem schools as voluntary “reverse integrators.”58 A more publicized case of voluntary white integration was launched by Chet and Dot Fulmer, who lived with their three sons in overwhelmingly white Sheepshead Bay (Brooklyn). The family, who attended Reverend Galamison’s Presbyterian Church in Bed-­Stuy, accused the board (in 1966) of erecting bureaucratic roadblocks to stop their children and other white children in their neighborhood from attending predominantly Black and Puerto Rican schools elsewhere in Brooklyn. At that point, buses carried a daily average of forty white children seven miles north to PS 20—­86 percent Black and Puerto Rican—­on the Fort Greene–­Clinton Hill border. Many of the children continued to travel to that neighborhood when they entered junior high school (JHS 294). Two events sparked the Fulmers’ plan to “reverse integrate” their children. In 1963, they attended a fast and prayer vigil led by Edward Gottlieb, the principal of PS 165 in Harlem, to recruit white families to transfer their children there. The Fulmers concluded reasonably that a daily round trip from the Southern tip of Brooklyn to uptown Manhattan was untenable. In the end, no white parents took Gottlieb up on his offer. The Fulmers were inspired by the citywide school boycott in February 1964 and disillusioned by the reactions of parents in their neighborhood. Along with some like-­minded neighborhood residents, they chartered a bus to take eighty-­five white children to PS 21, a segregated school in Bedford-­Stuyvesant, on the day of the second integration boycott (March 16). Only about one-­sixth of PS 21’s eight hundred students attended that day.59 According to the Fulmers, children at the school carried banners welcoming the Sheepshead Bay students, and their parents embraced the visitors as the children exited the bus. At the school entrance, District Superintendent Elizabeth O’Daley refused to let the Sheepshead Bay contingent into the building. The group ignored O’Daley, entered the school, and were led into the auditorium. Roughly one hundred Black students from the school joined them, against the orders of their principal. At a subsequent public hearing, Board President James Donovan judged the white parents wishing to send their children to Black and Puerto Rican schools to be a “bunch of phony fakers—­they’re not going to send

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their children anywhere.” This was the same James Donovan who, in May 1964, had criticized white parents for fleeing integrated schools in New York City. Carl Warren, principal of PS 20 in the Fort Greene–­Clinton Hill neighborhood, requested that the Board of Ed permit the children to enroll there. He later recalled: “When I heard about [the March 1964 sit-­in at PS 21], I invited them to come to my school. . . . I feel that you should never send children—­white or colored—­into schools where they suddenly become unique, as these children would have been in a school where no whites had ever been.”60 In June 1964, Superintendent Gross okayed the transfer as part of extended Open Enrollment, though the board sought applications for the transfer in “half-­hearted” fashion, the Fulmers alleged.61 On the first day of the 1964–­65 school year, thirty-­nine white children from Sheepshead Bay and Flatbush enrolled at PS 20, seven miles to the north of their neighborhoods. PS 153, where the Fulmer children had attended previously, enrolled four Black students out of 1,200. Their new school was 85 percent Black and Puerto Rican. The first day at their new school coincided with the massive Parents and Taxpayers boycott, when 233,000 white pupils stayed home in protest. “Boy, was the bus driver surprised,” Dot Fulmer remarked. “He couldn’t understand why we were not picketing.” A November Newsday story reported that all involved parties—­transfer and neighborhood parents, the children, and Principal Carl Warren—­were happy with the program. Fulmer remarked that her fourth-­grade boy was studying Spanish and “has really learned to respect the Puerto Rican youngster next to him. He comes home telling us that boy is a real whiz.”62 Elizabeth O’Daley, now assistant superintendent of the city’s More Effective Schools program, later contacted the group for assistance in launching a reverse Open Enrollment plan (white students transferring voluntarily to predominantly Black and Puerto Rican schools) for pre-­K students at PS 307, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. However, no bus transportation would be provided. Pressure by the group resulted in a reversal of that decision. This small gesture did not placate the Fulmers, who had closely witnessed the costs of the Northern integration struggle. In one instance, “we saw a police horse push a child through a plate glass window during a demonstration” at board headquarters in Brooklyn. “We saw the child’s blood flow. Headlines the next morning read: ‘Teenage Gangs Riot.’” The Fulmers denounced media accounts of their group’s efforts as “distorted

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and unsympathetic,” while acknowledging that media attention to their cause proved valuable.63 As of 1968, the reverse integration plans were still operating at both schools.64 Voluntary reverse integrators, many of whom also supported mandatory integration policies, were a reassuring reminder of the spirit of interracialism that continued to exist among some whites. At the same time, their choices could be puzzling. For example, the Fulmers appeared deeply committed to integration yet lived in an all-­white neighborhood. Similarly, in 1956, members of the PTA in Midwood, Brooklyn, had phoned the Commission on Integration to seek its help in hiring Black teachers for the school, which had an all-­white teaching staff. The CI’s account said the caller, a Mrs. Sackawitz, shared the concerns of local parents “that their children are being reared in a very undemocratic environment and not in keeping [with] the Supreme Court” (in Brown v. Board of Education). The parents sought “more cultural contact for their children,” who did “not come into contact with other races. The only contact with Negroes is with the Postman and domestic help.”65 Again, one is left to wonder why the parents at the school chose to live in all-­white neighborhood if they deemed integration important. In any event, the white “true believers” in school integration represented a glaring exception to predominant white attitudes. Even if triple the number of whites had been willing to take voluntary action in favor of integration, school segregation citywide would have barely budged. Many whites wanted city officials, as well as the city’s Black and Puerto Rican residents, to stay out of their schools and neighborhoods and leave them alone. Though many would not state it so bluntly, many whites preferred the continued quarantine of ghetto residents. For Black and Puerto Rican parents, integration was a means to an end: namely, improvement in the education that their children would receive. In the coming years, many would grow more receptive to other avenues that might achieve this goal. Exiting the New York City public school system was simply not a tangible option for most Black and Puerto Rican families. White Resistance Gets a Name While New York City could sometimes feel like a place apart from the rest of the US, the fall 1964 conflagrations over integrated schools were in step with the country’s escalating racial tensions. Nineteen sixty-­four was the year that “white backlash” invaded the American political lexicon. The widely read columnist

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team of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak had popularized the term. Three weeks before the 1964 presidential election, political journalist Theodore H. White penned a feature article in Life magazine on the phenomenon. White detailed the three most prominent demands of African Americans—­jobs, housing, and school integration—­noting that each issue evoked differing levels of alarm among politicians. Most politicians believed they could “handle” Black demands for greater job opportunities. Demands for access to good housing represented a more delicate political issue. But these two issues paled in comparison to school integration, “which causes politicians to flee to the hills”—­and many whites to flee to lily-­white suburbs. “No politician in his right mind will get himself involved in the problem of big-­city school integration if he can avoid it,” White said. Instead, he passes the buck to local school boards.66 In White’s sympathetic view, the NYC Board of Education had instituted an “imaginative” open-­enrollment plan, allowing Black students to transfer from segregated schools to underutilized, predominantly white schools; few objections were raised. However, when the board began to pair some Black and white schools to “placate civil rights groups,” backlash ensued in the form of Parents and Taxpayers, a group claiming from a quarter million to a half million members who were steadfastly opposed to any dismantling of the neighborhood school system. If a potential middle ground existed, the board proved unable to land on it from that point forward. For both sides of the integration debate, the path ahead was uncertain. In early 1965, Reverend Galamison narrowed his boycott ambitions, launching several boycotts of individual junior high schools and “600” schools, which served students who were classified as at-­risk due to behavioral or academic issues. The boycotts failed to gain significant traction.67 Malcolm X had joined Galamison for another school desegregation action in January 1965. The twenty-­four-­hour protest in Harlem, from 4 p.m. Saturday to 4 p.m. Sunday in the midst of a bitterly cold snowstorm, had been organized by EQUAL. Most of the thousand protestors at the rally were white. The average participant stayed for an hour or two, but a few, including EQUAL chair Ellen Lurie, remained the entire time. At one point early Sunday morning, only fourteen protestors remained, but there were around two hundred people present at the beginning and end of the vigil. As it ended, Lurie declared: “What we are really trying to say is that twenty-­four hours out in the cold is better than a long, hot summer.” Despite his presence

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at the protest, Malcolm X subsequently told a reporter that “these people have good intentions, but they are misdirected,” adding that “Harlem doesn’t need to be told about integration.” During this period, biographer Manning Marable observes, Malcolm was attempting “to appeal to so many different constituencies” and “often presented contradictory opinions only days apart.” A month later, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Galamison had been scheduled to speak at the event but had canceled his appearance, citing exhaustion after having preached two sermons earlier in the day.68 On a citywide basis, PAT and other anti-­integration parent groups helped to stop the expansion of school pairing. Beginning in 1965, PAT moved its focus to the legislative arena, installing a lobbyist in Albany to advocate for anti-­busing laws, pressing for an elected school board (which presumably would be more responsive to its desires), running candidates for local school boards, and persistently pressing local politicians on desegregation plans.69 The Integrationist Dream Recedes The twelve months of 1964 must have seemed to many New Yorkers like a lifetime, from the tragedies and triumphs of Freedom Summer in Mississippi and the passage of the Civil Rights Act to confrontation and vitriol in their own backyards, which included dueling school boycotts and the explosions in Harlem and Bed-­ Stuy.70 During that year, white resistance to integration—­whether expressed by the quiet exit of parents in Brooklyn Heights or the fervent protests of Parents and Taxpayers—­revealed more clearly than ever that New York City was no exception to the reality in America: white acceptance of integration, when it occurred at all, was contingent on Black families bearing its burdens, under terms that whites found acceptable. Said terms began with whites remaining the clear numerical majority in their “neighborhood schools.” In the South, Black hopes surged that the foundations of legal segregation would finally begin to crumble under the weight of new federal civil rights laws. But in New York, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act the following year were unlikely to improve the lives of everyday Black residents. Dismantling the city’s flexible regime of unofficial segregation would require convincing policymakers and white New Yorkers that racial isolation did not serve them. The scant progress made in this endeavor during the decade since Brown stoked frustration and rage.

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Intense racial conflicts over education would only escalate in the years ahead. In the latter part of the ’60s, the educational battleground would shift temporarily from integration to community control of schools in low-­income Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where residents’ faith in the board’s ability and willingness to improve education for their children had continued to spiral downward. If this is the best the board could do, these parents wondered, shouldn’t we be able to run the schools in our community, as occurs in the white suburbs?

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The Roots of Community Control

of integration to many of NYC’s school conflicts, it was the community-­control era, which lasted only from 1967 to 1969, that stands at the center of many New York City school histories. Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–­Brownsville (OHB), one of three experimental community-­control districts funded by the Ford Foundation, became the focus of media attention and controversy. The reasons for this are clear: the United Federation of Teachers launched three citywide strikes in fall 1968 to effectively dismantle the OHB district, which had attempted to rid itself of nineteen problematic teachers and administrators the previous May. As part of its public relations efforts to paint the union as a righteous victim in the conflict, UFT leader Albert Shanker portrayed OHB leaders as dangerous Black separatists who were anti-­white and, more pointedly, vehemently anti-­Semitic. While the UFT could certainly point to public anti-­Semitic statements by Black New Yorkers, they derived in large part from individuals who had no direct connection to the community-­ control experiment. Whether it was the responsibility of OHB school officials to disavow such statements became a point of contention between them and the UFT.1 Though the front-­page OHB confrontation yielded a range of analyses, some of the most influential media coverage relied far more heavily on sources from the union and the Board of Education than from inside Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, resulting in reporting that tended to amplify the notion that OHB leaders and community members were unreasonable, unrealistic racial extremists, and UFT teachers were their prey.2 The reality was far more complex. Before union teachers returned to city schools in November 1968 as the third strike ended, the environment in OHB schools was one of interracial cooperation based on mutual respect. The racial composition of the student body was entirely Black and Puerto Rican DESPITE TH E C E N TRA L ITY

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(around 80 and 20 percent, respectively), but for most of the students this represented no change in their school experiences, as they had always been enrolled in segregated schools. (The exceptions were students who had taken part in voluntary integration programs but transferred back to local schools after hostile treatment from students and faculty at their nominally integrated schools.) What did change for the students was the people running and teaching in the schools. The experimental district’s superintendent, known as the Unit Administrator, was a Black man by the name of Rhody McCoy. Half the principals in the eight district schools were men of color. The numerical majority of the district’s school board, known as the Governing Board, were local Black women. The teaching staff was nearly one-­third Black, a far higher percentage than in the typical NYC public school. Just as importantly, many of the white teachers who had replaced the white union teachers were there by choice. This was a significant change, as many teachers in so-­called difficult schools had been transferred there after failing to pass muster in more prestigious public schools or planned to leave their difficult school as soon as they were granted a transfer.3 The Tentative Coalition Accounts of Ocean Hill–­Brownsville inevitably address intensifying conflicts between Black community members and white union teachers. In the 1960s and ’70s, around two-­thirds of New York City teachers and nearly 90 percent of administrators were Jewish.4 Although African Americans and Jewish Americans shared a history of racial otherness in the US, their “educational and occupational trajectories diverged dramatically, beginning with America’s entry into World War II,” planting the seeds for future conflicts between the two groups, Melissa Weiner adjudges.5 Marc Dollinger argues that one can understand varying Jewish orientations toward political liberalism as intertwined with the desire to be accepted into the white American mainstream: “In the years after the landmark Brown decision, northern Jews discovered that their own desire for social inclusion compromised their liberal civil rights stand and drew them uncomfortably close to the political views of Southern Jews,” who typically did not want to jeopardize their precarious social position by opposing racial segregation. In South and North alike, “acceptance into the surrounding non-­Jewish society mandated that Jews adopt the prevailing social attitudes.”6

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Daniel Perlstein notes that “major studies by the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-­Defamation League [in 1967] concluded that blacks were less anti-­Semitic than non-­Jewish whites.” He contends that “the expression of anti-­ Semitism remained marginal to black concerns in 1968.” Richard Kahlenberg ascribes greater weight to the currents of anti-­Semitism in OHB, citing a 1969 poll that found increasing levels of Black anti-­Semitism and Jewish anti-­Blackness in New York. “If anti-­Semitism was a ploy to curry sympathy for the UFT,” he writes, “community-­control activists appeared oddly willing to help out.”7 The sting of anti-­Semitic invective—­whether delivered face to face or reported in the media—­was not something that its targets could blithely dismiss, whether it came from white Christians above them in the status hierarchy or those with lower status. As the socioeconomic gap between Jewish and Black Americans increased in the decades following World War II, the Jewish community began to see the “threat to [its] well-­being” coming “mainly from below.”8 In a widely read 1967 essay, James Baldwin describes Black anti-­Semitism in the following manner: In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-­Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—­for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage. For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.9

A substantial number of whites that Black people interacted with, though by no means all, were Jewish, particularly landlords, merchants, and teachers. When these interactions felt exploitative or condescending, whatever the religious background of the white person in question, Baldwin and many other African Americans felt their anger rise. In her book on community control in OHB,

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Jane Anna Gordon quotes Baldwin’s essay extensively, adding her analysis of the disconnect that developed between Jewish and African Americans. She writes: Although many Jewish liberals admit to social inequalities, they see the space of discourse itself as an equal playing field of interests in which differences can be worked out. In so doing, they have written out the impact that social inequalities have on who gets heard, and they thereby suggest that what one argues will have more force than who argues. . . . But all of this is premised on the presumption that white America really wants to hear, in a word, blacks.10

Similarly, Melissa Weiner contends that by the late 1960s, big changes in Jews’ social, political, and economic opportunities occurred alongside African American stagnation in those areas. . . . Although always on guard against anti-­Semitism, they truly saw America as place where everyone could succeed with hard work. This bootstrap liberalism obscured the reality of the privileges granted to them as whites, which facilitated their success. . . . Many Jews perceived African Americans’ persistent poverty as their own fault and, given [Jewish] belief in America’s equal opportunity, felt that if [African Americans] only worked harder, they too would succeed.11

Like Weiner, Jerald Podair points to diverging understandings between Black and Jewish New Yorkers about opportunities for and barriers to economic advancement in the United States as a key factor in unraveling the Black-­liberal-­labor coalition in New York City.12 Perlstein claims that “by convincing significant numbers of liberal whites that black advance could only come at their expense, the 1968 conflict [over community control in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville] marked the eclipse of liberalism in America’s political life.” Subsequently, he contends that “arguably no development in American race relations since the 1960s is more significant than the transformation of race-­blindness from a means of opposing racial inequality into a means of justifying it.”13 Indeed, in a school system where more than 90 percent of teachers and virtually all administrators were white and where education became a dead end for so many Black students, Black New Yorkers had scant reason to believe that allegedly colorblind meritocracy accrued to their benefit. Jonna Perrillo convincingly questions the strength of the alliance between New York teachers, who were disproportionately Jewish, and Black civil rights

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activists prior to the late 1960s. “As the history of teacher unions in New York before the 1960s shows, teacher unionists’ connections to race liberalism were complicated and questionable well before Ocean Hill–­Brownsville. Indeed, teachers’ resistance to assignments in black schools shows liberalism was a minority position within the [Teachers] Guild,” which later formed the basis for the UFT, “as early as the 1950s and that significant groups of nonunionized teachers were even more conservative on racial issues,” she maintains.14 When assertions about the inviolability of teacher autonomy and professionalism came into direct conflict with activists’ demands for the transformation of a school system that had left far too many Black educational victims in its wake, teachers unions chose self-­interest. This was no less tragic for its predictability. The first of the next two chapters examines the roots of the community-­ control movement, which emerged from a robust but ultimately unsuccessful effort to increase integration in local schools. The second interrogates the standard depiction of Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, the most contentious of the three community-­control districts, as a center of racial conflict and hatred. In doing so, it focuses on the period when schools there operated cohesively and harmoniously and how that environment deteriorated upon the return of striking union teachers. My claim that OHB schools were, for a time, “secretly” integrated does not deny that Black nationalism figured prominently into the political atmosphere at some, if not all, OHB schools. It does, however, vigorously dispute the argument that anti-­white racism or anti-­Semitism was the core cause of community control’s demise. The OHB case is a vivid illustration of the gulf between political actors with starkly different degrees of power. The UFT saw no payoff from acceding to the demands of Ocean Hill–­Brownsville. Above all else, the Board of Ed and Mayor Lindsay sought an end to the chaos created by teacher strikes. Even had the entire Black community in New York City rallied around the community-­control experiments, their numbers were insufficient to move the needle politically. Though African Americans comprised 30 percent of public school students in 1966, they were only 20 percent of the city population and 15 percent of registered voters.15 One could boil down the dispute between the UFT and the Ocean Hill–­ Brownsville school community to a single question: did the colorblind, meritocratic method of hiring, assigning, and promoting teachers protect against racial discrimination, as the UFT insisted, or did it create a teaching force littered with

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those who did not believe in the capabilities, or even the humanity, of Black and Puerto Rican children and thus eschewed any responsibility for affording them a high-­quality education? Put more simply, did the administrative checkpoints in teacher selection create admirable fairness or inexcusable racial injustice? Frustrated Hopes In 1958, Brownsville was a multiracial neighborhood, with whites still in the majority at 60 percent, but quickly growing Black and Puerto Rican populations. “White flight” had been fueled in part by the construction of public housing in Brownsville in the 1940s and ’50s; it had uprooted many whites who chose to leave the neighborhood rather than move into the new public housing projects. Substantial numbers of Black and Puerto Rican families who had been forced out of their neighborhoods by urban renewal projects elsewhere in the city landed in Brownsville. By 1962, the neighborhood was 75 percent Black and Puerto Rican, with a declining overall population. Eight years later, it was 77 percent Black, 19 percent Puerto Rican, and 4 percent white.16 In a fall 1968 article, the journalist Richard Karp bleakly described Ocean Hill as “a no-­man’s-­land between two no-­man’s-­lands.” Its residents, he said, “are the overflow of hopelessness and poverty from two of the most desolate communities in the land [Brownsville and Bedford-­Stuyvesant], perhaps the most unlikely of slum-­dwellers to band together for community action.”17 During the community-­control era, 71 percent of OHB parents were Black, 24 percent were Puerto Rican, and 4 percent were white; children of the latter group almost exclusively attended private or parochial schools. Slightly over a quarter of the parents had completed high school. A greater number, 29 percent, had not advanced past the eighth grade. Fewer than one-­fifth of parents had been born in New York City, with 51 percent born in the American South, 21 percent in Puerto Rico, and 10 percent elsewhere.18 Roughly one-­third of OHB residents moved each year, and many students, sometimes as many as half, switched schools during the academic year.19 A 1968 profile of Father John Powis, a white, activist priest who served on the Ocean Hill–­Brownsville Governing Board and was often viewed as its most militant member, portrayed the neighborhood in desolate terms as a reporter walked with him down St. Mark’s Avenue: “For devastated blocks around [Powis], the dull red or yellow brick buildings were abandoned, gutted and half-­demolished.

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Smashed, vacant storefronts spilled their litter on to the sidewalk. The neighborhood looked like a scene from a war movie.” Powis bemoaned the educational malpractice in the district: “We’ve got kids 11 and 12 years old who just never go to school. There has been nothing going on in these schools, except baby-­sitting.”20 These conditions had been festering for years, and the turn to community control in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville was not a sudden awakening. Rather, it emerged out of the realization that the most reasonable plans for integration were typically sidelined, sabotaged, or killed by the Board of Education, teachers, administrators, politicians, and white communities. Less than a year after the February 1964 citywide boycott to protest school segregation had electrified many in the Black and Puerto Rican communities, hopes that civil rights activism would pressure the Board of Education into adopting a strong integration program seemed almost delusional. Nevertheless, Black and Puerto Rican parents in East Brooklyn were not ready to concede that their children would continue to be poorly educated. Powis recounted that OHB schools around 1964–­65 had been “really, really very desperately bad” and “chaotic.” Overcrowded Ocean Hill–­Brownsville schools were on double session, meaning that the already underserved students there received one hour less of daily instruction than their counterparts in other schools.21 The sense of futility that was building among OHB educational activists was encapsulated by the fight over the location of JHS 275 in Brownsville and its implications for the racial composition of the student body. After a sustained fight, the Brownsville parents—­led by Reverend Milton Galamison and supported by five hundred Black leaders, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. among them—­had succeeded in having the school sited in a “fringe” area that would include white Canarsie students in the school zone. However, when the school finally opened in 1962, the Board of Ed zoned it so that children on the white side of Linden Boulevard would not be assigned there. The student body was 90 percent Black. Moreover, “for every school around which parents [throughout the city] organized to fight, ten new equally segregated schools slipped through the budget,” the civil rights activist Annie Stein wrote.22 In fall 1964, members of several existing neighborhood groups formed the Brownsville Community Council (BCC), which included African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and whites. The BCC was one of the first organizations to apply for Community Action Program funding under President Johnson’s War on

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Poverty, receiving a $20,000 planning grant in the summer of 1965. In 1966, Head Start became BCC’s initial program, serving 390 Brownsville children. Other BCC endeavors included summer camp, college preparation, a sports league, a youth council that focused on civic affairs, a “cadet corps” for at-­risk youth, classes for adults pursuing General Equivalency Diplomas (GEDs), and programs celebrating Black and Puerto Rican culture and history.23 The Community Action Program augmented the belief in poor communities that residents, not so-­called experts, were best equipped to solve the cascade of problems plaguing their neighborhoods. In February 1965, BCC members were among a group of 250 who braved ten-­degree weather in a twenty-­four-­hour vigil at PS 327 in Brownsville. They wanted the Board of Ed to know that, if they had their way, the elementary school would be the last segregated school in East Brooklyn. Rather than building more segregated schools, the board should construct an integrated educational park that would serve multiple East Brooklyn neighborhoods, the protestors insisted.24 East Brooklyn’s Black and Puerto Rican residents explored all avenues for school integration, believing at the time that was the best means to ensure educational equality. It was hard to keep the faith. In fall 1965, a large group of Brownsville students transferred through a voluntary busing program (Open Enrollment) under which Black students at overcrowded schools were permitted to enroll in selected majority-­white schools with empty seats. Reverend Powis accompanied a group of Brownsville students to their new school in Bay Ridge. (Some accounts say that children were sent to Bensonhurst and Canarsie as well.) In his recollection, he helped 1,700 students transfer. What they confronted was “a scene out of hell,” Powis recalled, as the children withstood thrown eggs and racial taunts. Eggs targeted Powis, too, his priest’s vestments failing to deter the angry crowd. Inside the school, Black students were segregated in separate classes, abused by white students, and ignored by teachers and staff. Most of the students transferred back to their old schools within weeks.25 It is worth noting here that Black and Puerto Rican students who transferred to integrated schools experienced a wide range of outcomes. As Annie Stein observed in 1971, while “many children returned hurt and damaged by the experience, . . . many [others] braved it and succeeded, and support for the [voluntary transfer] program has continued to this day, even in areas where community control is strongly supported.” The fact that these students had to

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“brave it” in order to receive an adequate education offers a sobering rebuke to anyone claiming that the New York City school system was—­or is—­a meritocracy. Moreover, as Stein added, “by 1962 only about 9,000 children (fewer than 3 percent of those eligible) had been transferred [under voluntary integration programs]. There was no open enrollment in the high schools. The schools in the ghetto were just as contained, overcrowded, powerless, and inferior as ever. And there were many of them.”26 As Stein suggested, segregated Black and Puerto Rican schools typically were not sanctuaries for students, nor for staff. The psychologist Kenneth Clark painted a distressing picture of the school environment in Harlem: “The dominant and disturbing fact about the ghetto schools is that the teachers and the students regard each other as adversaries. Under these conditions the teachers are reluctant to teach and the students retaliate and resist learning.”27 Teachers resorting to violence as a means of disciplining students was regrettably common. So, too, were low expectations of students. Many teachers concluded that low-­income Black and Brown students were simply incapable of learning due to “cultural deprivation” in their home and neighborhood environments.28 This self-­serving assumption—­don’t blame the teachers if their students learn nothing—­was particularly ironic in New York City, where Black creators had made enormous cultural contributions in literature, art, music, and other fields. New Yorkers could attend a Broadway showing of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a lecture by James Baldwin, a speech by Malcolm X, or a riveting musical performance by Miles Davis (to name just one of the many brilliant jazz musicians residing in the city)—­yet Black youth were written off as culturally deprived and facing bleak futures. In the ghetto schools, many students attended classes with teachers who preferred to be elsewhere. “The pattern of teaching in Harlem is one of short tenure and inexperience,” Clark observed. “Many white teachers are afraid to work in Harlem; some Negroes consider a post outside of Harlem to be a sign of status.” Harsh discipline often took precedence over learning, and “apathy seems pervasive.”29 Moreover, underlying animosity between Black and white teachers was not atypical. One Black Harlem teacher confessed: “I, by choice, try not to socialize with [white teachers] because I get sick and tired of hearing how our children will never amount to anything, our children are ignorant, [and] the homes they come from are so deprived.”30

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These interpersonal dynamics were not unique to Harlem schools. A similar situation held sway in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill, and Brownsville. The Promise of the Educational Park Activists in East Brooklyn had been lobbying the Board of Ed and City Hall since 1964 for an educational park, a massive complex that would bring thousands of students together in an integrated environment. In concept, effective teachers and staff would be drawn to the cutting-­edge park, which would offer the latest in technology and facilities, an expanded array of course offerings, and student support from psychologists, social workers, and other full-­time professionals. At the time, Brownsville was predominantly poor and Black. Canarsie was lower middle-­class and middle-­class Jewish and Italian. East Flatbush was nearly all white in 1960, but middle-­class Black (primarily West Indian) and Puerto Rican families began moving into parts of East Flatbush closest to Brownsville.31 The educational park proposal had the support of numerous liberal organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the American Jewish Congress, and the Catholic Interracial Council. Brownsville activists were particularly fervent in their calls for the park, but the local school board, controlled by white Canarsie and East Flatbush parents, stood in opposition on the grounds that such a plan would only accelerate white flight from the public schools.32 East Brooklyn integration advocates identified a ninety-­six-­acre parcel of city-­owned land, known as Flatlands, which separated Brownsville and Canarsie. Brownsville residents and other supporters formed Parents for an Educational Park (PEP) to push the project. The Board of Ed’s early reaction was largely evasive, but later it provided some encouragement. PEP members gathered three thousand pro-­educational park signatures in East Brooklyn, developed in-­depth plans for zoning and student assignment, and led bus tours of Flatlands for board and city officials. In June 1965, the board cited Flatlands as holding the greatest potential for construction of an educational park and placed a hold on the land. However, the opposition of well-­connected whites in East Brooklyn, conveyed in private meetings with top school officials, led to the rapid demise of the proposed project. For example, two local school board members made the case against the park to Superintendent of Schools Bernard Donovan and Adrian Blumenfeld, who directed school planning and research. The city councilman

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representing Canarsie conferred with Mayor Wagner, Comptroller Abe Beame, and Borough President Abe Stark. (His successor, whose district also reached into Brownsville, acknowledged that he had never visited the neighborhoods of his Black constituents because the area was “not . . . very important.”) According to the political scientist Harold Savitch, “most professionals at the board privately favored groups within the white communities for reasons not the least of which was simple racism.” They also distrusted and avoided innovation, making public statements in favor of bold action while undermining such change behind closed doors.33 Public hearings on the Flatlands proposal were, in retrospect, merely performances to justify decisions that had been predetermined. Administrative checkpoints would remain in place. In September 1965, the board announced that it had no plans to build an educational park in East Brooklyn in the foreseeable future. Civil rights advocates and pro-­park parents in the area condemned shifts in the board’s plan and appealed to State Education Commissioner James Allen, who a year earlier had helmed a panel that called for the creation of educational parks. In February 1966, Brownsville residents filed suit against the Board of Ed in an effort to halt its plan to build more segregated elementary and junior high schools in East Brooklyn. The lawyer for the thirty-­three petitioners, John E. Silverberg, accused the board of “entrenching an apartheid system,” and the city of “hiding behind the failure of other cities to integrate.” Under the educational park plan, junior high students would attend integrated schools and existing junior high schools could be converted to elementary schools rather than the city constructing new schools for the younger students. In June, Henry R. Fuller, one of the Black petitioners, decried the board members’ refusal “to get off their rusty rears, while our c­ hildren are the ones suffering.”34 The effort proved unsuccessful as Mayor Lindsay dedicated the Flatlands site as an industrial park several weeks later, near the end of July 1966.35 As student transfers and the aborted East Brooklyn educational park were crossed off the list of integration possibilities for Brownsville students, the final ray of hope came in the futuristic vision of a “linear city,” proposed by the Board of Ed and the city Planning Commission to replace the stillborn Flatlands educational park project. Under this concept, a six-­mile Cross-­Brooklyn Expressway would wind its way from Broadway Junction in East New York to Brooklyn College in Flatbush. Above the roadway would lie a linear city that incorporated

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schools for twenty thousand pupils, residences for six thousand families, a community college, shopping centers, industrial facilities, and transportation facilities. Federal highway funds were expected to cover 90 percent of the highway’s cost, with the state picking up the other 10 percent.36 Donald H. Elliott, chair of the Planning Commission, said the most important outcome would be a stabilization of the racial makeup of the area and increased school integration. Education Commissioner Allen prevented the board from building seven separate schools in East Brooklyn after the educational park proposal was killed. In August 1967, as the community-­control experiment was getting underway, Allen signed off on the linear-­city proposal as a tool for integration, ordering that the schools—­set to welcome twenty thousand students—­open their doors by September 1972. He specified that no elementary school in the linear city could have combined Black and Puerto Rican enrollment over 40 percent, unless it could show “special circumstances” existed; he set the figure at 30 percent for intermediate schools (grades five through eight). In announcing the decision, Allen denied that an educational park was the only sensible school solution in East Brooklyn, claiming that such a plan might not solve “the problem of racial balance, at least not on a long-­term basis.” Yet he also noted that the board was planning an educational park in the East Brooklyn neighborhood of Spring Creek.37 Brownsville, Canarsie, Flatbush–­East Flatbush, Midwood–­Flatlands, and East New York would be served directly by the futuristic city on stilts. The Brownsville parents who had pressed Allen for the Flatlands educational park supported the concept. Reverend Galamison, one of the city’s foremost school integration proponents, emphasized the urgency of the project: “If linear city fails, all hope for integration is lost.” City officials expected resistance from Canarsie and other predominantly white communities; Black Power advocates also loomed as potential opponents.38 Less than two years after the announcement of the project in February 1967, Mayor Lindsay asked the Board of Ed to abandon its plans to build new schools in the proposed $500 million complex, which had encountered unanticipated delays, and to make plans to construct them elsewhere.39 Finally, in May 1969, Lindsay ordered planning for the Cross-­Brooklyn Expressway to end, blaming the state legislature for failing to pass legislation that would result in the federal government reimbursing 90 percent of costs for the schools, parks, playgrounds,

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and other facilities that were to be built on top of part of the highway. State Assemblyman Stanley Steingut of Brooklyn, who served as the Democratic minority leader in the Assembly, said that every legislator from Brooklyn had worked to kill the Lindsay plan, which had Brooklyn residents “up in arms.”40 Ada Louise Huxtable, the renowned architecture critic for the Times, offered this postmortem: “The strip community of housing, schools, shops, services and industry to be built on air rights is an ambitious, experimental approach to solving urban problems. But the economic, political and technical realities of cost, timing, unification of warring community groups and political pacification, plus problems of air pollution and extremely complex structure, doomed the project from the start.” Even if all of these obstacles had been miraculously cleared, coordinating municipal departments would have been numbingly complex.41 The skepticism about educational parks was not purely logistical. The United Parents Association, a large and influential confederation of Parents Associations and Parent-­Teacher Associations that was typically viewed as politically moderate, questioned the capability of educational parks to adapt to changing demographics: If educational parks had been built to meet completely the needs of the ’20s and ’30s, over 1,100,000 seats would have been built. By the early ’40s, when school population dropped to about 830,000, there would have been 300,000 empty seats. Now the population has reached back to 1,100,000—­but the parks would have been in the wrong places. It would have been possible to utilize many only with extensive transportation—­and some would have been in segregated neighborhoods just as individual schools are today.42

Robert Dentler, a sociologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who had studied the educational-­park concept in considerable depth, was ambivalent. In Brooklyn, if ten thousand students were assigned to each park, thirty complexes would be required to house all students. Given anticipated demographic shifts away from Brooklyn, “several of these parks would be severely underpopulated by 1980.” However, he added, “space that opened up in a given park could be revised in use more flexibly than space that opens up in a small neighborhood school. The survival and flexibility in use of the Empire State Building are greater than that of the neighborhood grocery.” While a “complete

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network of education parks . . . could be so located as to guarantee substantial desegregation, . . . less enormous steps may be taken to accomplish school desegregation,” he determined. If the creation of a network of educational parks buttressed “the image of public education,” increased parental satisfaction and student achievement might follow, but these gains would subsequently dissipate when educational parks became the standard educational approach. “Since other less enormous innovations yield the same apparent gains in school learning, the education park seems to me a gigantic placebo,” Dentler concluded.43 And an extremely costly one at that. Nevertheless, some highly prominent figures saw great promise in the education park. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: Quality education for all is most likely to come through educational parks which bring together in one place all the students of a large area. Because of the economies of large-­scale operation, the educational park will make practical a multiplicity of teaching specialists and superb facilities. Involving students from a wide area attracted by the superior opportunities, such a plan will guarantee school integration even before housing is desegregated. The educational park is likely to be the next great structure for education. Funds should come from the federal government, which must move from supporting the fringes of education to supporting the basics—­the teachers and the facilities with which they work. The federal government should begin to provide building grants to local school districts and groups of districts so that educational parks can be constructed. Building grants should go to localities—­ cities and suburbs—­which locate schools so as to promote integration. The arbitrary lines of government should not serve to balkanize America into white and black schools and communities.44

That same year, the US Commission on Civil Rights presented an optimistic vision for the educational park, which would represent “the largest educational institution ever established below the collegiate level and the first planned explicitly to cultivate racial integration as an element of good education.” At the time, educational parks were being developed or planned in New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Syracuse, East Orange (NJ), Berkeley (CA), and Sausalito (CA).45 Though the educational park concept dangled the possibility of long-­term cost efficiencies, the upfront cost of such a venture would be substantial—­likely

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around $50 million for a park serving sixteen thousand students. Consequently, many supporters of educational park expansion believed that large infusions of federal aid would be essential.46 Seeking a Voice in Local School Matters Even if this modern vision of educational parks had been actuated, that development would have occurred well into the future, after many local children had graduated—­or dropped out. If Black and Puerto Rican parents could not convince the central board to adopt, or the white community to accept, far-­ reaching integration plans, at the very least they desired a stronger voice in how their local schools operated. Dolores Torres, who would serve on the OHB Governing Board, was raising three children and a niece, all of whom attended PS 144: “They told us the kids would have to go on double shifts. I had two going in the morning, and two going in the afternoon, the school was overcrowded to an extreme. . . . There wasn’t much learning, wasn’t much education going on.” When a group of parents traveled to Board of Ed headquarters in downtown Brooklyn to seek transfers to a nearby school in an abutting district, they were dismissed within minutes and directed to take their issue to the local school board. Consequently, Torres recalled, “We went into the local school board that represented, supposed to represent, our district. We found not one person on that board lived in our district. Most of the people on that board were White, [and] we were a district of mostly Hispanic and Black families. . . . They had no children in the schools in our district. We felt they weren’t paying any attention to us because we were the ignorant people. These were the educated people, these were the people with all kinds of degrees, and we felt that they didn’t care about us . . . or our children.”47 Ocean Hill–­Brownsville parents were voiceless on the local school board, which included Bedford-­Stuyvesant. Despite the strong majority of Black and Puerto Rican residents in these communities, the local board was dominated by middle-­class whites. Redistricting of school zones in 1965 combined OHB and mostly white middle-­class East Flatbush into the new District 17, but OHB parents saw no shift in their negligible influence. That board was controlled entirely by East Flatbush parents, who ignored the concerns of OHB residents. In October 1966, OHB parents announced the formation of their own independent local school board. In a letter to the Board of Ed and the recognized local school board,

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the independent board members—­who claimed to represent thirteen of the twenty-­five public schools in District 17 and alleged that the official local board “did not represent” the OHB communities—­asked for the assistance of the central and local boards in realizing a number of aims to achieve greater community engagement. These included full participation in all future construction plans; adoption of a new, “more realistic” curriculum; publication of reading levels for children in the district; a careful study of the schools that local children were bused to; and an effort to find auxiliary space for two overcrowded pre-­K and kindergarten schools. The independent board members also sought to address the future opening of IS 55, squarely in the Brownsville ghetto, which would later become one of the schools in the demonstration district: “Since the concept of the Intermediate School was that it would be of necessity an integrated school, and since the construction of I.S. 55 has taken place at a site where integration is impossible, it is our feeling that the community should have a definite voice in the selection of the principal, the staff and the curriculum for I.S. 55.”48 Though holding no formal powers, the independent board provided a public forum for parents to express their disillusionment with overcrowding, outdated textbooks, inadequate supplies, and insufficient school maintenance, as well as indifferent teachers and principals. If the city and local school boards failed or refused to assure quality education for their children, activists and parents concluded that they could do so. After all, local parents cared deeply about the education of their children. They would ensure that teachers and administrators did their jobs, and they could even volunteer to assist teachers in the overcrowded schools.49 The conceptual leap to community control was clear. “The plan for community control was get people on the local school board that represented these kids and would represent us,” Torres recalled. “We decided that there was too many schools to take over the complete district, we would have an experimental district of eight schools. Two junior high schools, six elementary schools.”50 Of course, low-­income, disempowered parents could not simply declare themselves a new, independent district. People who held power would have to grant them the authority. Such a delegation of authority would have to be driven by grassroots pressure and, for elites, a sense that such a shift would serve their own interests.

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Intrigued Elites In John Lindsay’s mayoral administration, the appeal of decentralizing the school system had been growing during 1966, his first year in office. Human Resources Administration chief Mitchell Sviridoff claimed that his agency was the incubator of decentralization, recalling that agency staffers believed that “the integrationist policy was never going to work.” In fall 1968, in the midst of the UFT’s debilitating strikes, the mayor’s office said that Lindsay believed “school decentralization is the most practical alternative, in New York, to cross-­city busing of students that the state has ordered in other areas.” Lindsay himself had campaigned on the idea that the city’s many unresponsive bureaucracies required radical reform. Budget Director Fred Hayes informed the mayor that if the current state funding formula for education, which treated New York as a single entity rather than five separate counties, was changed, the city would receive over $50 million in added funds in 1966, and more than twice that the following year.51 State Senator John Marchi, who represented Staten Island, was attracted to the idea that his borough would receive additional state school funding under a decentralized school system. While Hayes had proposed that the school system be subdivided only on paper, in March 1967 the state legislature commanded Lindsay, rather than the Board of Ed, to submit an authentic decentralization plan by December 1, 1967. Lindsay appointed a panel, helmed by the Ford Foundation’s McGeorge Bundy, to create a road map for decentralizing the New York City public school system. The Board of Ed chafed, believing that it was the appropriate body to dilute its own power.52 To have a centralized board steering education policy in the nation’s largest school system—­with over 1.1 million students, 70,000 teachers, 43,000 administrators and 900 schools—­seemed a recipe for unresponsiveness, and the NYC Board of Ed did little to convince anyone otherwise.53 Widespread public dissatisfaction came out in the open during a December 1966 public budget hearing, when the board refused to yield the floor to a Brownsville parent, Lilian Wagner, who wished to address conditions at the junior high school in which she served as PTA president. Because she had not requested time prior to the meeting, the board would not let her speak. Activists from around the city raised a clamor to protest the denial, and Board President Lloyd Garrison responded by adjourning the meeting. He and his fellow board members exited.

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A group of twenty to thirty activists, representing groups such as EQUAL, CORE, HARYOU-­ACT, United Bronx Parents, and the Brownsville Community Council, remained. Dubbing themselves the People’s Board of Education, members of the group assumed the vacant seats reserved for the board. The new “members” were Evelina Antonetty of United Bronx Parents; Babette Edwards and David Spencer, both of whom had participated in the fight for greater community involvement at the IS 201 school complex in Harlem; Thelma Hamilton of the Brownsville Community Council; Robert Nichol and John Powis, two white activist clergy; and Ellen Lurie and Rosalie Stutz, members of the predominantly white, fiercely pro-­integration group EQUAL. They invited Reverend Galamison to come to board headquarters, where the meeting was being held, and assume the role of president.54 The sit-­in continued with fifty-­two supporters spending the night in the hearing room. The following morning, a Tuesday, Garrison attempted to resume the budget hearing, asking Galamison to vacate the president’s chair. The minister declared him “out of order.” On late Wednesday afternoon, police ejected people in the hearing room, arresting Galamison, Lurie, and ten other protestors.55 Attesting that their persistent efforts to have a voice in their children’s education had drawn no meaningful response from the board, the “replacement” board proposed that local bodies be accorded responsibility for school appropriations, hiring, and creation of policy. In other words, they were demanding authentic community control of schools. In line with growing critiques of expertise, the People’s Board advocated hiring local residents as assistant teachers (also known as paraprofessionals) and rejected the latest call by educational authorities to create a task force to solve the problem of education in low-­income communities. The findings of such “outside experts” had resulted in little action in the past; now it was time for the deep, grounded knowledge of community members to steer solutions to local school issues. The People’s Board established local offices in five Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the city, holding hearings and continuing to publicize its criticisms of the educational status quo during the spring of 1967. It subsequently faded from view rather quickly as the Lindsay administration and the Board of Ed began to discuss the possibility of greater local control more directly with existing community groups.56 Reflecting its standard operating procedure, the formally recognized board offered some concessions to portray itself as responsive to community concerns.

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In April 1967, it solicited proposals from community groups to operate experimental, decentralized school districts. The Ford Foundation had begun planning for this opportunity earlier in the year. The board acceded to the Foundation initiative in the face of impending decentralization legislation, intensified school activism, and fears that summer uprisings, which had occurred in 1964, would return again. It agreed to consider proposals for experimental districts utilizing private funding in order to let the foundation proceed with its plans.57 McGeorge Bundy had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as a key advisor in the Vietnam War who advocated “sustained reprisal” against North Vietnam. He left government and became head of the Ford Foundation in early 1966.58 Despite no record of concern about racism or racial justice in the US, Bundy plunged headlong into these very issues as he took the reins at Ford. When, in the early 1950s, the foundation had worked with the Board of Ed to address the “problem” of Puerto Rican relocation to New York City, it concluded that education in racially integrated schools was likely to proceed smoothly, resulting in rapid assimilation. By the mid-­1960s, the foundation’s faith in white liberalism and integration had waned, leading its staffers to conclude that African Americans would benefit from a period of “developmental separatism.” Rather than working with the Board of Ed, the foundation would work directly with Black community members, even those considered radical. The assumption was not that the radicals would remake the school system according to their vision. Instead, through their involvement in community-­controlled schools, these radicals would, in Karen Ferguson’s description of the Ford Foundation’s concept, “learn the fundamental responsibilities and skills of political involvement and institutional management.”59 Once these capabilities had been developed, African Americans could “reconnect” to other racial and ethnic groups in the city as full, responsible political and social participants. Black supporters of community control did not share this long-­term goal. Scarred by years of empty liberal promises and white intransigence, these community-­control activists had their eye on Black self-­determination and liberation and the destruction or transformation of “the system.”60 Two Other Experimental Districts In May 1967, Schools Superintendent Bernard Donovan named OHB as one of the three demonstration districts, along with two other districts handpicked by the Ford Foundation.61 Those two were in Harlem (the IS 201 Complex) and on the

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Lower East Side of Manhattan (Two Bridges). The situation in Harlem bore some resemblance to that in OHB. In 1962, the Board of Ed had joined other relevant city agencies in announcing plans to construct a new junior high school at 127th Street and Madison Avenue, where East Harlem met Central Harlem. Metro North commuter trains rumbled over the neighborhood, which mixed light industry and dilapidated tenement buildings.62 Local school board hearings revealed some opposition to the location on the grounds that it would make integration impossible, whereas a location further to the east (near the Triborough Bridge and a rail station) could plausibly draw white Queens students attracted to 201’s new, modern building and high-­end academic offerings. In this early conception, IS 201 was to be a prototype of a magnet school where whites would attend voluntarily.63 In spring 1965, Bernard Donovan, who recently had been appointed superintendent, affirmed that IS 201 would be integrated. It would be one of the city’s first intermediate schools, accommodating students from the fifth through eighth grades. Several conflicts began to whittle local parents’ optimism that the Board of Ed would act in good faith. Some local residents objected to 201 being named for Arthur Schomburg, an Afro–­Puerto Rican who had amassed a huge library of materials related to the African diaspora. Many had never heard of him and apparently assumed he was white and Jewish. If nothing else, the controversy was an indication that many Black and Puerto Rican parents had long distrusted the board’s intentions.64 IS 201, completed in early 1966, was “a block-­square, windowless, air conditioned structure” with no playground space and no parking area for teachers. (There were, in fact, windows in the hallways, but none in classrooms. The air conditioning did not work properly for the first two years.) The enclosed $5-­million fortress was envisioned to increase student focus, muffle train noise, block views of the depressing surroundings—­and prevent the temptation for people on the street to send rocks crashing through windows. The two floors of the building were set upon stilts. The space beneath the structure, envisioned for public recreation and pedestrian traffic, was low in height, dark, and unappealing. One Harlem critic contended that the school was built without windows “to keep parents from looking in and seeing it wasn’t integrated, and the kids couldn’t look out to see it was in Harlem.”65 Some activists suspected that IS 201 and IS 55 in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, also windowless, were intended to double as jails if urban uprisings re-­emerged.66

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Marta Gutman, an architectural and urban historian, dubs the IS 201 complex “an equalization school,” a tactic used by Southern school districts in the pre-­Brown era to maintain racially separate schools through the upgrading of Black schools—­in other words, an effort to make a semi-­plausible case that Black schools had become separate but equal. “As in earlier slum-­clearance projects,” Gutman recounts, “a warehouse, a church, tenements, row houses, and an apartment house—­worn buildings, but the places where everyday life was lived in East Harlem—­would be demolished to make way for a public project that was planned with minimal citizen participation.” The head of the board’s Office of School Facilities Planning explained to a reporter that “we just don’t have time to consult the local people” when the city is building thirty or forty new schools annually.67 If whites would ultimately not attend 201, at least some Puerto Ricans would. District Superintendent Daniel Schreiber attempted a transparent sleight of hand in January 1966 when he affirmed that 201 would be integrated: half Black, half Puerto Rican. Attendance zones were rejiggered to achieve this balance. According to Sonia Song-­Ha Lee, “Schreiber’s manipulation of [Puerto Ricans’] ambiguous racial identity jolted them out of their ambivalence on the question of race. Although trying to straddle both the white and black worlds, Puerto Ricans realized that their silence on their racial status made them pawns in the system. The Board of Education treated them as ‘black,’ while referring to them as ‘white’ when it was convenient to do so.” Spurred by this awakening, a group of over 150 Puerto Rican mothers and their supporters picketed in front of PS 96, objecting that their children would be bused under the false veneer of integration.68 David Rogers’s influential 1968 study minimizes Puerto Rican involvement in educational matters, arguing that many did not want to be associated with the low status of Blacks and that their cultural deference to authority impeded potential activism. In addition, Rogers says, tensions between Blacks and Puerto Ricans were increasing in the mid-­1960s “as both groups [had] been fighting for control, jobs, and money in the anti-­poverty agencies and for positions in the city administration.”69 Lee’s detailed study of Latino civil rights activism in New York City offers a different take, asserting that Puerto Ricans, despite their participation in the first school boycott in February 1964, “had generally hesitated to embrace the integrationist vision too strongly because they believed they were ‘already racially integrated’ and saw the entire social experiment of

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racially mixing children as a ‘North American’ concept.” However, the drive for community control of schools united Black and Puerto Rican communities “because it shifted attention away from integration with whites toward a focus on building their own local resources.”70 In both Harlem and OHB, it was primarily African Americans who led the community-­control movement, but Puerto Rican inclusion was encouraged via advocacy of bilingual education and the appointment of the city’s first Puerto Rican principal in OHB. In the rhetoric of community-­control advocates, it was not always clearly or consistently stated whether Puerto Ricans were seen as “virtual Blacks,” an ethnic group that eventually would assimilate into whiteness, a distinct minority community with needs that overlapped with those of African Americans, or a silent, often invisible partner in the struggle. Harlem parents were not buying the claim that a half-­Black, half-­Puerto Rican school would qualify as integrated. Isaiah Robinson, chair of the Harlem Parents Committee (HPC), warned Superintendent Donovan that going forward with this false ruse of integration would “attract the strongest, most militant protest” from HPC and turn 201 “into a battleground.” (In 1971, Robinson would become the first Black president of the Board of Ed.)71 At a meeting with parents in late March 1966, Donovan acknowledged that 201 was likely to open with virtually no white students (from Queens, Yorkville, or the North Bronx), as they could not be assigned there involuntarily. Parent queries about the superintendent for 201 were met with Donovan’s response that one had been selected (after a prior candidate had withdrawn his name from consideration), but he would not divulge his identity. Presuming correctly that the choice was a white man, parents asked why the school could not have a Black or Puerto Rican principal. This was simply not possible, Donovan said. The only Black person eligible to become a junior high school principal was on leave. There were no Puerto Rican principals in the city.72 The Community-­Control Concept Mayor John Lindsay attended an April meeting of the local school board but left quickly as the atmosphere grew prickly. At this meeting, Harlem social worker Preston Wilcox read a paper that would become a seminal text of the community-­ control movement; many would later crown him “the father of community control.” The approach he proposed “should not,” he warned, “be construed as

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resignation in the face of continued school segregation, or as an acceptance of the ‘neighborhood school’ as this is commonly regarded by opponents of integration.” Echoing a 1960 report that he had co-­authored, he expressed concern for those “who will be left behind even if the best conceivable school desegregation program should be implemented.” The heart of the matter was this: if “the public school system can do no more than it is already doing, then the communities of the poor must be prepared to act for themselves.” Nothing less than “a radical redistribution of power” was required.73 Despite his use of this later-­incendiary phrase, Wilcox’s early iteration of community control seemed reasonable. He suggested the creation of a School-­ Community Committee (SCC), selected by parents of children enrolled at the school, consisting of “parents, local leaders and professionals in educational or social science fields who would be drawn from the community or outside it, if necessary.” Among the SCC’s responsibilities would be screening and interviewing candidates for principal. Principals in the NYC system, he commented, have substantially more “power and influence vis-­à-­vis the board than is generally realized, or than they generally take advantage of.” The principal’s accountability to parents would be a novel and “probably disagreeable experience” for most who held that position. Rather than trying to erase student backgrounds and values that struck him as “repulsive,” the principal would draw upon these student characteristics as a resource. Other duties of the SCC would include reviewing reports by the staff and higher-­up school officials, and coordinating after-­school and weekend programs serving students and the community. “Foster teachers” drawn from the community would serve as advisors for specific classes.74 Wilcox’s conception of community control likely took some cues from Community Action Programs, launched as part of the federal War on Poverty, which had called for the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in the creation and operation of anti-­poverty initiatives. In this view, credentialed experts could not design effective programs on their own; they needed to work with individuals who had firsthand insights about what measures might help to lift them out of poverty. The reactions of politicians and other elites to authentic empowerment of the poor would be echoed in subsequent conflicts over community control: members of the community could state their views and offer suggestions but ultimate decision-­making authority would remain in the hands of the traditionally powerful.75

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Wilcox had been wrestling with issues of racial justice, and how integration might play a role in the pursuit of this goal, for some time. He cut a memorable figure on the streets of Harlem and East Harlem. He claimed to be 6'3", but many suspected that the former professional basketball player had shaved up to four inches from his actual height. “Loose-­jointed, in anatomy and personality” and possessing “a small-­town Midwestern breeziness,” Wilcox seemed to be something of a neighborhood celebrity when he toured East Harlem with a reporter for a 1962 Harper’s Bazaar profile.76 Wilcox, too, had once embraced integration, though perhaps never as warmly as Kenneth Clark or Milton Galamison had. Wilcox had worked at the East Harlem Project (EHP) from 1957 to 1963, initially as a tenant organizer and later as director. In November 1960, project staff began to study the experiences of East Harlem families who had taken part in a voluntary transfer program, launched in February of that year, from overcrowded neighborhood schools to less crowded, predominantly white ones in Yorkville, an affluent neighborhood on the Upper East Side, which spanned East 79th to East 96th Street between Third Avenue and the East River. According to the report that Wilcox co-­authored, “a secondary and unstated aim of the program was to promote racial integration.” (The board would often claim integration initiatives were nothing of the sort, merely attempts to utilize available space.) In East Harlem, which stretched from 96th to 125th Streets between Fifth Avenue and the East River, some students attended shortened daily sessions due to overcrowding. Expansions in public housing and reluctance of private interests to invest in East Harlem meant that one-­quarter of residents would soon live in public housing.77 On the eve of the transfer, the board estimated that four hundred Harlem and East Harlem students would attend five schools in Yorkville. The EHP study focused on two sending schools and one receiving school. At the time the transfer program began, PS 183, the receiving school, was 5 percent Black and 8 percent Puerto Rican. The sending schools were PS 121 and PS 109, both virtually all Black and Puerto Rican; more specifically, the schools were roughly two-­thirds Puerto Rican and one-­third Black, with white student populations at about 2 percent. Eighty-­four children from PS 121 and PS 109, around 6 percent of those eligible, took part in the East Harlem–­Yorkville transfer program in the first year.78 Wilcox and his co-­author, Marta Valle, reported enthusiastically that the majority of transferred children “showed dramatic improvement in their school

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work, in their attendance, and, generally, they showed renewed vigor and interest in school.” However, the authors were careful to clarify that even an expanded busing program would miss many East Harlem children: “What of the children who are left behind? What of their educational opportunity? What of their schools? What are their chances?” Expanding on this point, the authors argued: If the East Harlem schools do, in fact, wear the stigma of being inferior, it is not lessened by such programs as busing, re-­zoning, and open enrollment, which aim at promoting racial integration. The stigma can affect student motivation, parental interest, teacher investment and community practices. This situation exists, not because racial integration is an unsound goal, but because such programs have been designed to promote racial mixing in schools located outside of areas like East Harlem.79

Because these voluntary, one-­way transfer programs tend to draw motivated families, the departure of these students likely serves to attenuate the potential of schools in East Harlem, they noted. Regardless of one’s views on integration, Wilcox and Valle avouched, if one accepts that a segregated white school can be high quality, then one must also believe that a segregated Black and Puerto Rican one can be as well.80 School officials would echo this assertion, though in their case this primarily reflected a desire to punt on integration rather than a genuine belief in the proposition. As late as 1967, Wilcox still believed that integration was viable under the right circumstances. In December of that year, he mailed a solicitation letter to Harlem religious institutions, urging their support of the private, integrated Manhattan Country School (MCS), located on the East Harlem–­Yorkville border. His son David was a student there; Wilcox was a sponsor and charter trustee of the school. (Kenneth Clark also played a key role in the launch of MCS.) Wilcox explained: “As a participant-­theoretician in the IS 201 controversy that shook public education in America to its foundation, I hold no brief for integration which is based on concealed white supremacy.” At MCS, which opened in September 1966, “Black and poor welfare clients sit beside white and privileged students.” One-­third of the inaugural class was Black and Hispanic. Half of the sixty-­six students were on scholarship.81 To Wilcox, this was a school where integration worked. However, he would later disassociate himself from MCS.

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Ironically, even cynically, some stakeholders who had shown little enthusiasm for aggressive integration initiatives objected to community control as being anti-­integration. Responding to the objections of the union, Board of Ed members, and “others who see their economic positions threatened,” former New York CORE chairman Clarence Funnye reasoned: Some will invoke the dream of multi-­racial education, saying that schools controlled by ghetto parents will not be “integrated.” But are they integrated now? Is there any hope that they ever will be? . . . This is not an opt for segregation. Simply proposed, it would mean that since segregation of school pupils in New York City is a fact (as it is in the South), shouldn’t Blacks have a Black hierarchy running their own schools? Surely Northern whites should be no less egalitarian than their Southern brothers.82

The Vision of Integration Dissipates At a June 1966 meeting with parent representatives, Donovan reiterated that the board could not assign white students from outside the zone to attend IS 201, nor could it empower a community committee to have strong influence in school matters. He explained that the board had prepared leaflets to circulate to white parents, highlighting the anticipated virtues of the new school, and had dispatched new 201 principal Stanley Lisser to Queens several times to plug his Harlem school. The four-­page leaflets he had referred to, ten thousand in number, had been distributed to schools in the Northwest Bronx and some sections of Queens where whites predominated. Touting “quality integrated education” housed “in a modern, air-­conditioned building,” the leaflet promised that students would be versed in “the history and culture of all minority groups,” emphasizing the experiences of Afro-­Americans and Puerto Ricans. An integrated education was needed “for successful living in a democratic, multi-­cultural and multi-­racial city, nation and world.” All students would have the opportunity to study a foreign language, a musical instrument, and typing. Maximum class size would be twenty-­four, compared to thirty-­plus in the typical junior high. School bus service would be provided.83 The board’s makeshift marketing campaign flopped, drawing expressions of interest from no more than twenty families. According to Thomas Minter, some white parents who toured the school during the summer admired the school

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facilities but were apprehensive about the tense relationships between educational officials and the community and feared that violence would take place at the school in the fall.84 The Harlem uprisings in the summer of 1964 were probably not far from their minds. IS 201’s planned opening in April 1966 was delayed due to community protests. As the summer wore on, it was unclear whether 201 would open in September, the beginning of the new school year. The day after a June meeting with Lindsay staffers, local parent-­activist Babette Edwards wrote to Mayor Lindsay: We are tired of running around the city at the beck and call of city officials simply to report the same demands which have been spelled out at length to other members of the administration. We are tired of having each level of officialdom report that it can do nothing. We intend to do everything in our power to stop 201 from being used if it is not operated as an integrated school. . . . If massive demonstrations perpetuate violence in the coming days and weeks you will bear the full responsibility.85

By mid-­August, top school officials gained some urgency in facing the heated situation at IS 201. Local parents seemed to realize that integration of IS 201 was a pipe dream. If the board would not integrate the school, “the community must be allowed to have a deciding voice in the school’s operation,” they insisted.86 Superintendent Donovan and Board President Garrison countered that the board could not defer its responsibility for the school; the parents argued that it had already done so. If integration was out of the question, they demanded “total community control”—­the first time the parents had used this phrase. On September 6, the top two people in education offered an arrangement that would give a community council some involvement in screening candidates for hire, but nothing approximating control. The parents would not take their word for it, given their experiences with school officials over the last four years. Two days later, Garrison said if the parents wanted control, there was nothing to discuss—­it was not on the table. The parents walked out.87 From a loudspeaker attached to the roof of a car, parents urged Harlemites to keep their children out of 201. They flooded the area with handbills, promising that 201 would not open without “integrated quality education or total community control.” The latter would entail parents and other residents hiring staff, reviewing textbooks and curriculum, and regularly assessing academic

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achievement in the school: “Under the control of the Board of Education, 85% of our children are being crippled. We can do no worse. The school must be run by people who care.” Until the demands were satisfied, the activists pledged to keep 201 closed “by whatever means are necessary.”88 In the face of a boycott threat, Superintendent Donovan did not open 201 to students during the first week of school. He threw a few bones to parents. If they registered “sound and serious” objections to potential staffing hires, they would be heeded. He announced that the appointed white principal for IS 201, Stanley Lisser—­who local parents wanted replaced by a Black man—­had asked for a transfer, and that 201’s Black assistant principal, Beryl Banfield (who was close with Lisser), would take his place as acting principal. Teachers boycotted in support of Lisser. Banfield refused the appointment, saying she wished to be selected for her capabilities, not her race. Lacking a principal’s license, she would not have wanted her acceptance of the post to obscure the dearth of Black principals eligible for appointment. She deemed Donovan’s move as “sheer exploitation. No Board of Education official has yet sat down and explained to me just what . . . is happening.” (Banfield later reversed course and took the acting principal post at 201.)89 Teachers at 201 refused to report; thirty-­five Harlem principals threatened to quit if Lisser was not brought back. Sticking his finger in the air again to gauge the swirling political winds, Donovan reinstated Lisser and claimed that parents had overstated the power he had agreed to accord them. IS 201 would open the next day.90 Parent leader Babette Edwards had been active in the movement for integration prior to the beginning of the 201 saga. She had participated in meetings at the Board of Education and the mayor’s office, and with US Commissioner of Education Harold Howe. She had seen her hopes for quality integrated education at IS 201 bolstered and then dashed repeatedly. As the blur of events that was September 1966 wound to a close, Edwards reluctantly admitted that she had changed course. Feeling betrayed by the “broken promises of white officialdom,” she advocated that 201 become a showpiece for “quality segregated education,” which would include the naming of a Black principal, parental power to veto objectionable staff appointments, and real influence in school policymaking. “We are not champions of segregation or even racists,” she clarified. “What is happening here is the result of white racism. . . . Black Power was a reaction to the fact that white society was going to do nothing.”91

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On Wednesday, September 22, Lisser and the full teaching force reported to 201, as did over half the students. A severe rainstorm—­the worst in over six decades—­soaked the city, but fifty picketers still marched around the school. They were joined by the Trinidad-­born, Bronx-­bred Stokely Carmichael, the recently appointed chair of SNCC who had electrified and unsettled the nation that summer with his call for “Black Power.” He told the crowd that “Negroes have a right to run the schools in their areas. White people do” in the suburbs, “and it should be the same in Harlem.” Members of Harlem CORE, the Black Panthers, HARYOU-­ACT (Harlem’s official designee in the Community Action Program), the Nation of Islam, and the Organization of Afro-­American Unity also took part.92 According to the Washington Post, “there was near bloodshed as Carmichael’s followers broke through police barricades in an effort to bar Lisser from the school.” The police arrested ten individuals, few of whom were parents, during that week. By Friday, 80 percent of students were in school. Roy Innis, leader of CORE’s Harlem chapter, deemed the demonstrations “a prelude to war”; the local issue had escalated to “a national battleground,” he warned.93 By February 1967, it appeared that substantial numbers of parents at 201 were dismayed with their children’s experiences there. One IS 201 mother, Vivian Walters, appraised that both teachers and parents were “disgusted.” “A thirteen-­ year-­old girl beat a teacher, the principal doesn’t care,” she said. Others accused teachers of not assigning homework or addressing misbehavior.94 Time magazine was unsympathetic toward the IS 201 parents: “Even when aging structures are replaced by ultramodern schools, minority groups continue to complain.” The national newsweekly reported that local parents boycotted the school for five days because “it was not fully integrated,” when in fact the school was not integrated at all, unless one considers a half Black and half Puerto Rican student body to fulfill that criteria. It also falsely stated that local parents “demanded an all-­Negro teaching staff ” and averred dismissively that “unruly students have reflected their parents’ pique by disrupting classes, [and] committing wanton acts of vandalism.” Pointing to elite schools such as Bronx High School of Science (where Stokely Carmichael had received his diploma), the report concluded that the most urgent need in the system was “a more cooperative attitude on the part of minority-­group parents and their children—­less bitterness and violence, more concern about the real business of learning.”95 This evaluation was as ironic

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as it was wrongheaded, given that IS 201 parents became forerunners in the movement for community control of schools, demanding that they be accorded more power to shape the education of their children. New York Times education reporter Fred Hechinger was also pessimistic, opining that “total control,” while highly unlikely to be granted, “would be cheered by racists in predominantly white areas who could then claim equal ‘total control.’”96 In Harlem and Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, the demand for community control grew out of exasperation with the Board of Ed’s unmet promises on school integration. When parents and other community members began to call more aggressively for authentic authority in how local schools operated, the board and various media members typically painted them as ill-­informed and unrealistic. The UFT and some media members would weaponize the fiery rhetoric of vocal racial “militants,” often with little or no connection to local parents, to delegitimize the parents’ quest to finally secure adequate education for their children. Although parents in Harlem and East Brooklyn turned to community control after their final hopes for integration were crushed, there was never a groundswell among parents in Two Bridges for community control. The Ford Foundation was drawn to this Lower East Side community, where the majority of children were Chinese or Puerto Rican, as a means of demonstrating that the community-­ control model could work in a multiethnic neighborhood—­white and Black students also lived there—­that included some middle-­class residents. As Maia Merin explains: Two Bridges, for the most part a devoutly Catholic neighborhood, was overwhelmingly hostile to the mostly female community organizers who supported community control. This was a neighborhood that valued adherence to traditional school-­community relationships and male-­dominated households, and was therefore threatened by the reforms proposed by the main community organization. . . . Many of Two Bridges’ conservative, multiethnic community residents held fast to their respect for authority and tradition, objecting to community control on these subtle but prevalent grounds.97

Two Bridges would gain far less attention than the demonstration districts in Harlem and Brooklyn and arguably made the least progress, having never garnered the community support necessary for the project to take root.

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Making Sense of the Shift to Community Control In one respect, the turn to community control simply reflects the unearthing of a strategic alternative to integration, which the Board of Ed proved reluctant to foster in any meaningful way. But integrationism and community control did not run on completely separate tracks. As the historian Russell Rickford elucidates: The arena of education demonstrates how attempts to reform deteriorating institutions and social services in black communities creatively drew on Black Power ideas. Such campaigns included demands for integration, an objective that even in Black Power’s heyday remained vital to the pursuit of privileges reserved for white children. . . . Many African Americans acknowledged the need to refine or transcend the elusive goal of integration, undertaking a search for alternatives that reflected powerful impulses of self-­affirmation within black life. . . . The notion of pragmatic nationalism as an enduring feature of black political consciousness helps explain why local African American struggles that pursued school integration in the 1950s and early 1960s [subsequently] embraced black autonomy and the rhetoric of cultural distinctiveness, a change sometimes described as a wholesale move to separatism. In truth, popular philosophies of black education displayed a complexity too often obscured by more doctrinaire or exclusive varieties of contemporary African American politics and protest.98

In Harlem, as in OHB, activists did not impulsively reject the ideal of integration. Rather, they concluded that the fight for authentic integration—­not merely the mixing of bodies—­had reached a dead end, at least for the time being. Along with other local activists, the Harlem Parents Committee, a pro-­ integration group formed in 1963, “dismissed one-­dimensional integration schemes that neglected the priorities of educational excellence and equity. Neighborhood protests against the district’s offers of ‘open enrollment’ and ‘free transfers,’ programs widely seen in the community as palliatives for educational apartheid, rejected these measures as placing an ‘unjust burden solely upon Negro parents and children,’” Rickford writes. He adds: “Harlem’s pursuit of ‘other-­way’ integration—­the transfer of white students into black neighborhood schools—­ itself reflected a vision of desegregation as a process of mutual sacrifice and benefit.” By 1965, HPC concluded “that it is both desirable and possible to achieve academic excellence within the segregated schools, either as an end in itself or

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as preparation for eventual integration.”99 Even as late as 1969, 201 Governing Board member Babette Edwards stated that community involvement in school operations was “a significant step toward integration,” so long as integration was advanced by local people, rather than white education officials.100 Integration and community control, then, were interwoven strands of Black emancipatory aims. Those educational and political officials, including Mayor Lindsay, who believed that greater local voice in the operation of schools presented a less-­contentious path to educational reform benefiting Black students would find themselves wildly mistaken. By the spring of 1967, OHB would take center stage as the community-­control battleground between local residents, the UFT, and citywide school officials.

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Ocean Hill–­Brownsville’s Afrocentric, Multicultural Vision

and the UFT expected that planning for the demonstration districts would proceed at a customarily languid pace—­ particularly because most teachers were nowhere near Ocean Hill–­Brownsville during the summer—­the Ford Foundation was in no mood to wait, granting $44,000 to the OHB project in early July 1967. When announcing the grant, the foundation’s Mario Fantini proclaimed that the soon-­to-­be-­elected OHB governing board would have the authority to hire and fire school personnel without the approval of the central board.1 This was not at all what the board or the teachers union had in mind. While decentralization typically referred to greater input into school matters from local community members, community control implied that most important school decisions, including the hiring and firing of teachers, would lie in the hands of the community. The foundation had selected and funded the Harlem and Brooklyn experimental districts to prove that a greater voice by Black New Yorkers in community schooling ultimately would result in their assimilation into the mainstream of education. Ocean Hill–­Brownsville and the IS 201 district in Harlem both had substantial Puerto Rican populations. “What may have looked from the outside like radical grassroots experiments in participatory democracy were actually initiated by the Foundation from above in order to achieve its assimilationist ends,” Karen Ferguson writes in her history of the Ford Foundation.2 Just as the board’s selection of which demonstration districts to approve was not an open competition, the Ford Foundation had pinpointed the three districts in which it wished to launch the experiments and the local organizations it would support in applying for board approval. Ford targeted groups that were “representative of the most militant, the most alienated, the most mistrustful, the most volatile grassroots people challenging the educational system in New York WHILE TH E C E N TRA L BO A RD

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City,” according to an internal document.3 In reality, however, their choice of organizations came via personal contacts. In Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, the foundation tapped Father Powis, the pastor of Our Lady of Presentation Church, to be their point person, a result of the activist priest’s friendship with Mario Fantini.4 As with community action groups funded by the federal government’s War on Poverty, other local groups had some disagreements with anointed organizations about their right to lead, what the “community” needed, and how to obtain it. Superintendent Bernard Donovan and the board did not impede the brisk activity in the experimental districts, though a subsequent board analysis conceded that it “would have preferred a longer period of planning” in OHB. Once the planning period had ended, “the board was confronted with a fait accompli and a demand to implement the plans that had been formulated.” The board explained that it could not turn back the clock on the projects “without being accused of hypocrisy and giving lip service to decentralization,” which it had supported in some form since at least 1961.5 However, as the experiments unfolded, the board repeatedly failed to exercise definitive leadership in clarifying the precise parameters of community control. The School Year Begins By the time the new school year began in September, OHB schools were transformed. Rhody McCoy, an eighteen-­year veteran of the school system who had recently served as acting principal of a “600” school for troubled youth, was the unit administrator. Elections for the Governing Board had been held under conditions that some considered questionable, but they went uncontested. The parent members who had been elected, all Black women, named five community representatives: Dolores Torres, who was Puerto Rican; Father Powis; Walter Lynch, the director of community services at JHS 271, who would leave the Governing Board within a few months; Reverend Herbert C. Oliver, a recent transplant from Birmingham who was elected chair of the Governing Board; and State Assemblyman Samuel Wright, who would later attempt to undermine the experiment and seize control of the district. The latter three were Black. A white professor at Brooklyn College, Stephen Lockwood, and two assistant principals were added to the board, which was racially and economically integrated in a manner seldom seen in city school districts. Teacher delegates to the Governing Board, standing in for teachers

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who would be elected, were annoyed at the selection of McCoy over the more conventionally qualified Jack Bloomfield, the white principal of JHS 271. In a subsequent vote on replacing five principals who had transferred out once the experimental district was created, the union teacher reps walked out of the meeting, never to return.6 A glimpse of the newly hired principals affirmed that OHB was not operating business as usual. In a city in which a mere 4 of the 865 principals were Black, all at the elementary level, the Governing Board appointed two Black men: William Harris and Ralph Rogers (who also was Jewish). Irving Gerber (white and Jewish), Luis Fuentes, and David Lee also received appointments. Fuentes became the first Puerto Rican principal in the city; Lee, the first Chinese one. The sixth appointee—­to IS 55, which was being constructed—­was Herman Ferguson, who was under indictment for conspiring to murder “mainstream” civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins (NAACP) and Whitney Young (Urban League). Superintendent Donovan vetoed the appointment; Ferguson was subsequently hired as a consultant to the IS 201 district.7 While some believed the charges against Ferguson were manufactured or trumped up, he left little doubt that his political intentions were revolutionary. In his March 1968 article describing a “black survival curriculum,” Black school children would begin the day with morning exercises, followed by “target practice on the school shooting range,” a class focused on “weaponry, gun handling and gun safety,” and another with martial arts instruction. Problems in math class would “focus on such practical matters as wind velocity, muzzle velocity and other mathematical considerations involved in firing, repairing and making weapons.”8 Reverend Powis deemed Ferguson “the most brilliant” Black teacher he had met, but he retrospectively conceded that it was a “tactical mistake” for the OHB Governing Board to hire him.9 Soon after the hirings, the UFT and the Council of Supervisory Associations (CSA) filed suit contesting the appointment of the new principals, who were not selected using the standard practice whereby one of the three highest scorers on a competitive exam was hired. The exams included an oral component where Black and Puerto Rican applicants were often eliminated for having Southern or Puerto Rican accents. Of the fifteen hundred assistant principals in the system, a mere twelve were Black.10 The new appointees did not have many licensed teachers to supervise, as the UFT had struck at the beginning of the school year to fight for wage increases,

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expansion of the More Effective Schools program (which augmented the teaching staff in “difficult” schools), and, most controversially, a disruptive-­child provision. Under the third provision, teachers would have the authority to expel a “seriously misbehaving student” and dispatch him to a “special service” school for troubled youths, long seen as a warehouse for problematic students. Many Black educators strongly objected to teachers having such power over these students, a substantial proportion of whom were Black. Members of the African-­American Teachers Association (ATA), which had been formed in 1964, were some of the most scathing critics of the proposal.11 The fourteen-­day citywide strike, while not aimed at OHB, thickened the animosity of the district toward teachers and supervisors clinging to a system that parents viewed as racist and unfair. OHB schools remained open, with members of the ATA helping to staff schools along with parents and non-­striking UFT teachers, most of whom were Black. Thirty-­five other Brooklyn schools also operated during the strike, with some white UFT teachers reporting to their schools. When the strike was settled with the UFT winning only wage increases, Mayor Lindsay lauded ATA president Albert Vann for helping keep OHB schools open.12 UFT president Albert Shanker was angry with community-­control supporters for trying to break the strike and believed that the Governing Board was betraying the ideals of race-­blind, meritocratic hiring, nonviolence, and integration that the Southern civil rights movement had embraced. Shanker was proud of his civil rights credentials. He had joined Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 Selma march, bringing King keys to station wagons the UFT had purchased to bring rural voters to polling places. The following year, he convinced union members to join civil rights groups in supporting the creation of a civilian complaint board to hear accusations of brutality by NYC police officers.13 Nevertheless, as conflicts between the experimental districts and the union continued to escalate in the ensuing years, Shanker’s and the UFT’s past contributions would mean little to those who saw the union’s effort to undermine and ultimately destroy community control as outright racist. Following the strike, numerous UFT teachers quickly requested transfers out of the district. Shanker brokered an agreement to allow up to 10 percent of OHB teachers to transfer per semester, quadruple the customary allocation of 5 percent per school year. At the start of the 1967–­68 school year, seventeen of twenty-­one assistant principals submitted their resignations; they were transferred

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out gradually. McCoy insisted that new assistant principals not be subject to competitive exam requirements. Donovan retained the meritocratic checkpoint and rejected McCoy, assigning the new assistant principals, all of them white, from the ranked exam lists. Needless to say, this was not the sort of community control that McCoy and the Governing Board had envisioned.14 The Mayor’s Advisory Panel on Decentralization (MAP) aligned itself more closely with OHB’s vision of community control. Known informally as the Bundy Panel, because it was headed by the Ford Foundation’s McGeorge Bundy, the task force submitted its final report in November 1967, holding that the once-­great NYC school system “is caught in a spiral of decline.” The lurching bureaucracy at the Board of Ed was a major cause of this decline. In MAP’s vision, the school system would be divided into a federation of thirty to sixty local districts, overseen by a substantially weakened central education agency. Community boards, which would combine elected and appointed members, would control all public elementary and secondary schools within their district. The boards would allocate funds distributed by the central education agency and hire a district superintendent. While MAP anticipated that teachers currently holding tenure would retain that status, it hinted that tenure decisions going forward would rest in the hands of community boards, not a centralized education agency. Community boards would hire teachers and staff freed of the strict ranking system (based on examinations) that had long governed appointments to school posts and that had resulted in an overwhelmingly white teaching and supervisory staff. The report, entitled Reconnection for Learning, sidelined the contentious issue of integration. After all, widespread integration could take place only under the strong direction of the Board of Ed, which was part of the problem, not part of the solution. Echoing the Ford Foundation, the panel envisioned that Black communities would ride solo for an unspecified period, reentering New York City’s purported melting pot when they had gained the confidence and capabilities to participate fully and equally.15 Unsurprisingly, the UFT and the Council of Supervisory Associations came out against the Bundy Plan, the former asserting that “this proposal is anti-­ professional,” as lay board members could bring charges against tenured teachers: “It would encourage local vigilantes to constantly harass teachers.”16 Now that MAP had released a working plan for decentralization, the next, considerably more difficult task was to convince the state legislature to pass it. The UFT, which

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viewed itself as the co-­manager of the school system along with the Board of Ed, would use all the weapons in its arsenal to prevent any dilution of its power. In effect, the UFT stationed itself at a political checkpoint. Back to Brooklyn In December 1967, Rhody McCoy reported that “we keep going up to the point of crisis, and then down again.” The New York Post disclosed that leaders of the OHB project felt the experiment was “near collapse,” citing delays in securing reasonable office space and Ford Foundation grant money (which prevented the district from hiring parents as paraprofessionals), as well as the Board of Ed blocking the district from hiring the supervisors it preferred. At this point, McCoy had not been given an office in one of the district schools, which was customary for district superintendents, instead overseeing the district from a converted real estate office with a shortage of desk space and phones, no heat, and no paper duplicating machines. On a more upbeat note, the Post reported that teacher morale was increasing, with some cancelling previously filed transfer requests.17 If that was the case near the end of 1967, the environment had changed dramatically for the worse by March 1968, according to Leslie Campbell. Campbell had been a teacher at JHS 35, a virtually all-­Black school in Bedford-­Stuyvesant, but had been suspended in February 1968 “for taking my class to a Malcolm X memorial program.” Press reports highlighted inflammatory rhetoric in a play written by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), where one character said the white man was “a diseased white bitch” who infected Black people, and a speech by Herman Ferguson that urged his fellow African Americans to arm themselves for self-­defense.18 Due to his excellent teaching record, according to Campbell, Superintendent Bernard Donovan permitted him to transfer to JHS 271 in March. He was “incredulous” at the conditions that existed at his new school: There was no teaching going on. The teaching had just stopped. Teachers came in in the morning with radios, with coffee and cake and newspapers. Teachers left their classrooms to place their bets at the track. The teaching process within that school had been suspended. Groups of children roamed the halls, children brought games to school, they brought comic books to school, there was no formal teaching program taking place in Junior High School 271 in the spring of 1968.

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Campbell believed that the UFT was making “a calculated effort . . . to sabotage the experimental program.” He elaborated: “By creating conditions that suspended formal educational programs, they sought to show the city and the Board of Education that this group of parents running this experimental program didn’t know what they were doing and that no education was going on and therefore the project was a failure.”19 Teacher lateness and absenteeism were widespread. In one instance, a teacher poured paint on a classroom floor to concoct a false accusation of misbehavior among students. Perhaps the most infuriating case of teacher irresponsibility occurred in April 1968, when there was a fire at PS 178 about an hour before the school day ended. Students and teachers waited outside the building. When the end of the school day rolled around at 3:00 p.m., ten white teachers headed home, leaving their elementary school students by themselves.20 The Governing Board informed Shanker that “the unconcern” of the PS 178 teachers “is typical. The parents are damn sick and tired and will put up with these teachers no longer. They will get the hell out or be put out of the community by the parents who are willing to use force if necessary.” Shanker responded curtly, with an air of condescension: “Teachers’ rights will be protected. If you have valid complaints which can be substantiated, then you will use the proper procedures rather than those you suggested in your telegram.”21 After the traumatic assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 amplified tensions between white union teachers and their Black and Puerto Rican students, conflicts between the experimental district and the city’s educational bureaucrats grew more heated as McCoy and the Governing Board vowed that they alone would hire administrators for their schools, without examination requirements. After the Board of Ed refused this demand, the Governing Board announced a school boycott on April 10. That day and the following one, no students attended OHB schools.22 Supporters of community control had by this time concluded that playing by the board’s fuzzy rules would result in death by a thousand delays, sidesteps, and outright rejections. Black teachers Leslie Campbell and Albert Vann believed that the district had only one remaining option: “Disregard the Board of Education and assume whatever powers you can in running your schools. Hire and fire the teachers and administrators of your schools. Revise your curriculum to fit the needs of your community. . . . While you are legally fighting for other powers, assume those that you can legitimately assume.”23

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In an April 15 press release, the African-­American Teachers Association (ATA), which Vann and Campbell headed, concluded that the Board of Ed had “reneged on [its] obligation to give the projects the necessary ‘tools’ to operate. The Demonstration School Projects are a farce and another example of the type of conspiracy perpetrated on our children by the ‘Monsters at 110 Livingston Street,’” the address of board headquarters in Brooklyn. The ATA presciently predicted how events would unfold: when parents and community groups realized that they were granted “token powers,” they would “engage in numerous struggles with the board to obtain ‘real powers.’ These struggles will lead to bad publicity and worsened education conditions in the Demonstration schools. At the end of the allotted time the board will declare the projects a failure . . . and will be able to continue with business as usual.”24 Once again, the board’s use of administrative checkpoints could prevent a new initiative from developing—­or end it quickly. On Thursday, May 9, 1968, any remaining possibility of a productive relationship between the OHB district and the UFT was ended. Nineteen teachers and administrators received a letter signed by McCoy and Governing Board chair C. Herbert Oliver informing them that the district was terminating their employment immediately. They were instructed to report to central board headquarters the next day for reassignment.25 The deep frustration that had led to this dramatic action is encapsulated in a report from the district’s personnel committee to the Governing Board, which called for the removal of one principal, five assistant principals, and fourteen teachers from the district. (One name on the list, the only Black staff member who was included, was subsequently excised.) During the summer of 1967, when parents visited community members to engage them in the local school situation, “the people were unanimous in their desire to have definite control over the Principals, Assistant Principals and teachers who would cooperate with us in seeing to it that our children begin to learn. We made it clear that the professional staff would be judged not on the basis of ethnic background, but solely on their desire to teach our children and cooperate with the experimental project,” the personnel committee recounted. The district’s personnel prerogatives “faced constant opposition” from the Board of Ed, the UFT, the Council of Supervisory Associations (CSA), and the State Commissioner of Education. “We were constantly told that our demands” to hire off of the ranked civil service list “‘were opposed to state laws’ but we found that the people in the street considered these laws written to protect the monied white

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power structure of this city. After an entire summer of arguing with the Board of Education and the State Commissioner, we were told that we could not select our own state certified Assistant Principals or teachers” but could select principals with state certification when there were vacancies. After settling on four candidates to fill existing principal vacancies, “it was evident that the Board of Education, the CSA and the UFT would try even harder to see that the project failed.” The new principals immediately encountered resistance from the assistant principals and some teachers, the committee noted.26 During the fall of 1967, the district told Superintendent Donovan several times that one incumbent junior high school principal “was allowing his school to disintegrate” but remained in his post until February 1, by which point he had “totally ruin[ed] that school.” He was rewarded with a promotion to a school in Staten Island. Since assistant principals were required to be hired from the ranked list and that list had been exhausted, the assistant principal vacancies in the two junior high schools, with one exception, were filled with licensed elementary school principals. While some of the new assistant principals “have worked hard, . . . others have continued to oppose the project either openly, or in underhanded and clever ways.” The committee divulged that many teachers, Black and white, were cooperating in the experiment, but “a small, militant group of teachers” continued their opposition to the project. The report also alleged that an assistant principal at PS 144 “has been instrumental in dividing the Black and Puerto Rican communities in that neighborhood.” (Similar accusations had been made about other staff members trying to foment tensions between Black and Puerto Rican students.) The committee expressed disappointment with the Ford Foundation for delaying funding allocations, leading the members “to wonder whether Ford really wants to see our children succeed, or was the original money ‘cool-­off ’ money for last summer”?27 In listing the staff members they wished to eliminate from the district, the committee correctly predicted that “we will be condemned for having to make this unpleasant recommendation. But every attempt on our part to solve the problem has met with failure. So we will have to write our own rules for our own schools. Enforcement of those rules will have to be carried out by the people of the community.”28 McCoy said the action was due to “intolerable conditions and a general worsening of the situation between certain professionals and the people in the community.”29

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To the UFT, this was not about a deprived community fighting desperately for quality education but about destroying the rights of union members to contest their dismissal. Whether the teachers and administrators were being transferred or fired was a matter of much dispute. In a 1988 interview, Al Shanker depicted his perspective in the following manner: The Governing Board had no more right to transfer these teachers out than I have the right to transfer you to the Soviet Union. That is, transfer is something that’s accomplished by a high authority who has control over School A and School B and I say, “I’m transferring you from School A, because I’m the superintendent and I’m transferring you to School B where I’m also the superintendent.” But how can somebody say, “I’m transferring you out of this district, to where?” Rhody McCoy didn’t have any control over any schools out of the district. So, if I say, “I’m transferring you out of the United States,” what am I doing? I’m not transferring you, I’m firing you because there was no place that he had the right to send them to.30

In criticizing the move by McCoy and the Governing Board, Shanker also highlighted the severe limits of the district’s authority. Traditional district superintendents could transfer teachers within the district without much problem. If a school outside the district was willing to accept the teacher, that sort of transfer could be arranged as well, though these typically took place at the beginning of the school year. (Donovan remarked in a spring 1969 interview that “no other district particularly wanted [the dismissed OHB teachers] at the moment.”31) Problematic teachers often agreed to the transfer rather than face an unsatisfactory rating in their records. “Ghetto schools,” which had a disproportionate percentage of substitute teachers, often wound up with teachers who were drummed out of middle-­class schools. One would assume that McCoy saw little benefit in the within-­district transfer option: why would he want to place a teacher opposed to the experiment in another district school?32 While the Governing Board portrayed their actions as a simple transfer request, the UFT insisted that the teachers were being fired and demanded written charges against them. Eleven of the teachers and all six administrators returned to their schools the following day, prompting McCoy to charge them with insubordination.33 On May 14, a phalanx of community residents and ATA teachers blocked the entrance of the teachers and administrators who had been told by the

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Governing Board not to return to JHS 271. Two of John Lindsay’s aides, Sidney Davidoff and Barry Gottehrer, advised the mayor against having the police move the staffers through the angry crowd. Lindsay accepted their advice, enraging Shanker.34 Schools Superintendent Bernard Donovan closed three of the eight schools in the district on May 16 and 17 after protestors had occupied JHS 271 and prevented the ousted teachers from returning. Approximately three hundred police officers cordoned off JHS 271 to prevent the occupation of the building for a third day. The community boycotted the other five schools, resulting in only about 1,300 of the typical 8,800 students attending classes.35 On May 22, nearly all the 350 union teachers in OHB schools walked out in solidarity with their dismissed colleagues, never to return for the remaining five weeks of the school year. In the 1967–­68 school year, OHB students lost fifty-­two school days, or nearly 30 percent of the school year: a fourteen-­day citywide strike at the beginning of the school year, the two-­day boycott in April, and the UFT walkout over the nineteen transferred or dismissed union members, which covered thirty-­six school days.36 The summer break provided little respite for any of the involved parties. McCoy and the Governing Board set out to find 350 teachers to replace the UFTers who had walked out. The newly expanded Board of Ed released its decentralization blueprint in mid-­August, proposing a robust plan whereby local districts could hire teachers not included on the ranked lists, have greater say over curriculum, textbooks and budgets, and transfer teachers involuntarily to other districts willing to employ them. Shanker threatened a citywide strike, claiming that local hiring and firing would “open a field day for bigots and racists.”37 The new members included longtime integration advocate Milton Galamison, who to varying degrees expressed support for community control, as well as three others believed to be sympathetic to community control. The momentum for decentralization increased in late summer when two opposing board members resigned and Lindsay named their replacements. In the fall, one new member stepped down for health reasons and Lindsay appointed John Doar to take his place. Doar was nationally known as the chief lawyer for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the pinnacle of civil rights activism in the South, playing a key role in a number of historic national events. When James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, Doar was by his side, staying the night in Meredith’s dormitory room as

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a bloody riot raged outside. He led successful federal civil rights prosecutions of seven men involved in the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Mississippi. Doar had moved to New York earlier in 1968 to take a leadership role with the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, one of the largest community development projects in the nation. Perhaps Doar’s appointment to the board and election as board president stemmed from his well-­earned reputation for addressing conflicts between fearsome adversaries. With his new appointees and his replacements for departing members, Lindsay would have an eight-­to-­five majority on the board by the fall, but no one could assert with much confidence that the board and city politicians would be able to get the UFT and the OHB Governing Board to arrive at a mutual understanding on a path forward for the experimental district.38 On August 26, 1968, Francis E. Rivers, a retired African American civil court judge, ruled in a nonbinding decision that the ten UFT teachers who continued to contest their dismissals had the right to return to their jobs. In doing so, he concluded that the evidence presented by OHB did not prove that the teachers in question compared unfavorably to others in similar situations. The charges against the teachers did not include accusations of bigotry. “How do you document a bigot?” McCoy wondered. While reasonable on its face, Rivers’s decision highlighted the conundrum that OHB and other low-­income districts confronted: when many, if not most, of the teachers in a school are ineffective, and thus comparatively average, how do you rid yourself of them and find quality replacements? In the words of the journalist Barbara Carter: “With such standards, how could the ghetto, over a period of time, weed out poor teachers and replace them with good ones, supposing good ones are available? It means that where the majority of children are failing to read, no teacher can be held accountable.”39 A Turbulent Autumn All involved—­the OHB school district, the UFT, the Board of Ed, and Mayor Lindsay, among others—­girded themselves for an explosive beginning to the 1968–­69 school year on September 9. Mayor Lindsay and the Board of Ed sought to forge an agreement with the UFT and the CSA to avoid a strike. The Governing Board was marginalized. Donovan later offered a terse justification: “The people who were on strike were not the local board, but the union. And when you want to get strikers back to work, you don’t negotiate with anybody but the fellow who’s

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striking.”40 Governing Board members, a number of whom were low-­income Black and Brown women with limited educational credentials, interpreted this exclusion as simply being sidelined once again. On September 9, 93 percent of teachers were absent, and less than 5 percent of the city’s one million students reported to school. UFT teachers formed picket lines in front of OHB schools. Shanker insisted that the strike was not racially motivated, saying the action was “to protect black teachers against white racists in white communities” and vice versa. The first strike was settled after two days, with Lindsay and Donovan agreeing to return all UFT teachers in OHB back to their schools and specifying that all involuntary teacher transfers would be resolved by binding impartial arbitration rather than local boards, as had been described in the board’s decentralization proposal in August. Union officials received special job protections.41 OHB had managed to hire nearly a full contingent of the 350 teachers needed to replace the UFTers, 210 of whom still intended to return to their posts in OHB. The UFT number included the ten remaining teachers who had received the dismissal letters in May. “Mostly young and inexperienced, [the replacement teachers] included graduates of Ivy League colleges, a large number with graduate degrees, former Peace Corps and VISTA volunteers, civil rights and antiwar activists, and some just looking for a job that would keep them out of the draft. Seventy percent were white, and half of the white teachers were Jewish.” Journalist Barbara Carter deemed the OHB staff as “the most integrated” in New York City.42 Twenty-­two-­year-­old Charlie Isaacs was one of them, having decided to relinquish his full scholarship at the University of Chicago Law School to teach math at JHS 271. Of the 109 teachers at JHS 271 who began the 1968–­69 school year, 43, including Isaacs, were first-­timers. Sixty-­two were teaching in the district for the first time; eleven vacancies remained. On the first day of school, after entering amid a large police presence and a noisy UFT picket line, the school’s eighth graders—­the oldest of the three grades—­assembled in the auditorium, where Albert Vann, the ATA president and acting assistant principal, told the students what was at stake for them: “We must live together, and make it as a race. We must survive.” To do so, he said, “we need the skills we can learn right here at 271: Math; Science; Reading; Typing; Languages.” He instructed students to respect their teachers, whether Black or white, but assured them that if teachers did not respect them or were not up to

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their jobs, then “there’ll be some changes made.” To close the assembly, Vann called out the iconic first line of a James Brown hit: “Say it loud!” “I’m Black and I’m proud!” came the raucous response. In Isaacs’s recollection, the student body at JHS 271, the epicenter of conflict in OHB, was around 90 percent Black, with the remainder Puerto Rican. He recalled: “In my classroom for awhile I had the Black Liberation flag and the Puerto Rican flag, but the cultural atmosphere was all about Black nationalism.”43 The return of the UFT teachers on September 11 after the two-­day strike became one of numerous subsequent incidents where accounts varied widely. The attempted barring of the returning teachers by community members proved no match for the hundreds of police officers at 271, nearly all of whom were white—­except for the three Black officers who opened the school doors to let the teachers in, with the consent of 271 principal William Harris (also Black). The teachers soon headed back out to nearby IS 55, where McCoy had called an orientation session. Some of the most dramatic and well-­known accounts feature scenes of local people throwing bullets at the teachers, menacingly shutting the lights on and off, and threatening UFTers with death. Isaacs was not at IS 55 that day but raises convincing doubts about this incident. Most pointedly, there was a large throng of police officers lining the walls of the auditorium. Members of Mayor Lindsay’s Urban Task Force were there as well.44 It is a little difficult to believe that the police officers would look the other way while “Black militants” physically intimidated and threatened white teachers. After the meeting, teachers returning to JHS 271 once again found the entrance to the school blocked; police escorted the teachers inside. They stayed in a locked classroom until the police accompanied them as they exited the school.45 Isaacs recounts that officers dragged OHB parent protestors, including a visibly pregnant woman, into the police wagon and beat back others outside JHS 271. Some were hospitalized.46 One UFT teacher, informed that the police had beaten one of the Black students, opined that if the cops “had roughed up a few more of those kids, . . . all this wouldn’t have happened.”47 The reentry of UFT teachers to city schools was short-­lived, as the union’s executive board voted to strike again on the evening of September 11. The Governing Board and the UFT dug in further. Reverend Oliver said pointedly that the role that the UFTers would play in OHB schools was simple: “Get out of the community.” Shanker tagged McCoy and the Governing Board as “racists”

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and insisted that the second citywide strike would not end “until the Governing Board is out of power.”48 By launching the second citywide strike, the UFT clearly wanted to paint the Governing Board as dangerous militants who would destroy the city school system, with only the UFT standing in its way. That much of the city’s white population bought the UFT’s case testifies to the power of racial fear and resentment. Teachers Fighting for Community Control Not all union teachers agreed with Shanker’s characterization that the conflict was a righteous union battle against racism in schools or that demands for community control were an affront to trade unionism. Many Black teachers faced the difficult choice of whether to fight for reform within the UFT or disassociate themselves from the union. Richard Parrish was the highest-­ranking African American in the UFT, serving on the executive board and as assistant treasurer of the union. In the national American Federation of Teachers, Parrish was a vice president and had served as chair of the civil rights committee. Through his efforts, the UFT sent a contingent of teachers to Prince Edward County, Virginia, in the summer of 1963 to teach in Freedom Schools for Black children, who had been locked out of school since fall 1959. He had been teaching since 1948. Parrish was firmly committed to justice and equality for African Americans, but one could not credibly dismiss him as a radical or militant, thus exposing the mistaken assumption that only African Americans on the political fringe advocated for community control. Parrish launched the Black Caucus during the UFT strikes in fall 1968. On September 14, 1968, the Black Caucus announced its formation and demanded that the Board of Ed open city schools on Monday, September 16, stating its “unequivocal support of Rhody McCoy” and its opposition to Shanker’s “irresponsible” strike. Two months later, the Black Caucus steering committee strongly supported decentralization and community control, specifying that “the community must have complete administrative and financial control of all the schools in its boundaries as is enjoyed by all other school districts” in the state. The committee rejected the idea that “Black and Puerto Rican people have to prove via demonstration projects that we are capable of running our own schools. No other ethnic or religious group in the history of this country has been forced to do this.”49

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In a May 1969 article published in Labor Today, Parrish bluntly asserted that the UFT strikes of 1968 “damaged almost irreparably the relationship between the union and the black and Puerto Rican communities.” Many whites, as well as Blacks and Puerto Ricans, shared this view, Parrish said. “The strikes,” he charged, “were against the legitimate aspirations and educational goals of black children,” and those who struck “seemed to have no concern with the educational achievement of over a million youngsters” in NYC. Mayor Lindsay and the Board of Ed deserved a share of the blame, but so did the UFT “for reversing its historic commitment to the Freedom Movement.” By 1968, the Black community, frustrated with the limited progress on integration, “would not be consoled by having white people run their lives and institutions under the guise of liberalism.” When the three demonstration districts were launched, the Board of Ed “gave [them] no effective guidelines and no effective power,” an illusion of authority that Parrish deemed “the epitome of hypocrisy.”50 Parrish conceded that if the OHB Governing Board had waited six weeks for the end of the school year before transferring the nineteen teachers and administrators they deemed problematic, “they could have avoided raising the much-­exaggerated issue of ‘due process.’” However, “they wanted to show that they had some power!” The union’s demand for formal hearings was “contrary to custom” in cases of teacher transfer. The UFT’s victory in the hearings was predictable, he observed, because the Governing Board argued not that the teachers were “unqualified, merely that they were uncooperative.” The UFT’s refusal to negotiate with the Governing Board directly, instead using the central board as go-­between, “is a type of plantation bossism which I think is reprehensible.” Parrish rejected the union claim that a decentralized system would require it to negotiate thirty separate contracts—­or whatever the ultimate number of districts turned out to be. A system-­wide contract could still cover salaries, pensions, basic working conditions, tenure, and seniority. “Only matters which are peculiar to local districts” would need to be negotiated with local boards, he contended.51 Referring to claims by Bayard Rustin that the strong majority of Black UFT teachers supported the strikes, Parrish countered that Black teachers would likely have reported to their schools during the strikes had the CSA and custodians union not locked out “the vast majority of teachers” in the city. Parrish disputed the UFT’s assertion that “black extremists” were the cause of the strikes, a contention that he depicted as “a new, modern form of red-­baiting.” Instead, he

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said, racism was the core cause of the dispute, and the strike “merely widened the rift . . . and split this city as it has never been split before.” However, Parrish expressed his belief that “this rift can be healed” and recommended that the UFT Black Caucus members remain in the union to bring UFT teachers together with Black, Puerto Rican, and poor communities. “As long as we in education do not understand the racist nature of our political, economic and social acts, we are only perpetuating a racist society,” he reasoned. Among his suggestions were political activism to end segregated housing and schools, accounts of the contributions of Blacks and Hispanics in textbooks and curriculum, and greater representation of Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the teaching and administrative staff, as well as within the UFT. In the final paragraph, Parrish declared that the same UFT that staffed Freedom Schools in Mississippi (and Virginia) should have the will to work hand in hand with the experimental districts and eliminate educational racism in NYC, “even within its own ranks when it is found to exist.”52 While the Parrish-­led Black Caucus remained within the UFT, the influential African-­American Teachers Association had severed ties with the union in 1967.53 During this period, many other cities also endured conflicts between teachers unions and proponents of Black self-­determination, but the racial battle in New York was especially pitched. In Chicago, for example, African Americans constituted roughly 30 percent of the teaching force, more than three times the proportion in New York. The Black Teachers Caucus remained within the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), giving it more leverage to press issues affecting Black communities. A two-­day strike in 1969 split the union into those seeking improvements to education and those prioritizing increased pay; nearly half of Black teachers and nearly a quarter of all teachers crossed picket lines. Two years later, a CTU strike drew broad member support across racial lines, and the union won both increased pay and some educational upgrades, such as more teachers’ aides and reduced class sizes.54 In New York, the racial divide between the UFT and Black communities remained front and center. The Second Strike Ends, But a Third Is Soon Threatened In Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, JHS 271 continued to operate “relatively smoothly,” according to Isaacs, though student attendance was substantially depressed by the outsized police presence around the school, given that UFT teachers were not trying to enter the school and the union demonstrators outside had not been

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assaulted or “seriously threatened.”55 On September 20, in an apparent attempt to counter UFT propaganda and reverse the suspension of the Governing Board (which turned out to be brief this time), an ad in the New York Times signed by an array of prominent African Americans asked, “Why don’t they want our children to learn?” The signatories stated the issue plainly: Negro and Puerto Rican parents sought to achieve quality education through desegregation. They have been mocked and thwarted in this approach. They then turned to decentralization as a desperate alternative. And, again, they are being blocked. The vested interests which fought attempts to integrate the schools are now fighting community control. They seem blind to the inconsistency and racism of their position.

Among those signing the statement were James Baldwin, Mamie Phipps Clark, Le Roi Jones, James Earl Jones, Jackie Robinson, Nina Simone, Albert Vann, and Wyatt T. Walker.56 Late on the night of September 29 at Gracie Mansion, a strike settlement emerged. The Governing Board had not been invited to the negotiations. Board members Galamison and Doar had walked out, infuriated by Shanker’s accumulating demands. What remained of the board agreed that UFTers would be granted teaching assignments and would receive back pay, and that both the central board and the union would place observers in the schools. The ranks of UFT teachers wishing to return had declined to 83, from 210 at the beginning of the school year three weeks earlier. Only five of the original nineteen who had received dismissal letters remained in the district. The Governing Board maintained that it had “no intention of returning to the old days of educational genocide,” vowing that it would not abide by the terms of the agreement forged by Lindsay, the Board of Ed, and the UFT.57 At 271, seventeen UFT teachers walked down the barricaded block and entered the school, which was flooded with police officers on the outside and observers on the inside from the central board’s members and professional staff, the UFT, and the Governing Board. Many accounts stress the hostile reception of union teachers by the district’s students and “loyal” teachers, as the replacement teachers referred to themselves. However, according to Isaacs, the UFTers were “deliberately obnoxious” in the hopes of provoking retaliation from the other teachers. In Isaacs’s eighth-­grade math class, a UFT teacher strode in uninvited,

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picking up papers from the floor and checking out the classroom decorations. Isaacs demanded that he leave. “He slowly and calmly strode to the door, stopped to rummage in the wastebasket, belched loudly, gave me the middle finger, and finally stepped out.” At a meeting at the school in the evening, Reverend Oliver promised that none of the UFT teachers would be assigned to classrooms the next day.58 The interracial group of loyal teachers walked out of JHS 271 on the morning of October 1. With some of the older students, the group headed to IS 55, a half a mile away, where they hoped to have students and teachers from that school join them. At IS 55, parents and community residents heckled police officers, who were also targeted by eggs and at least one rock. The police advanced on the protestors, pushing the barricades in both directions and swinging nightsticks. People began to run from the scene. Isaacs recalls that most officers seemed pleased that the demonstration had been quashed, but some couldn’t resist clubbing protestors. As the marchers made their way to a couple of elementary schools in the district, many white teachers exited, replaced by young “militants” in the community. Officers with rifles ascended to the rooftops of nearby apartment buildings. At the schools where people protested, the principals shut them down for the rest of the day.59 Shanker was threatening a third strike in the new school year. On Sunday, October 6, Donovan hit the Governing Board with a thirty-­day suspension for evading orders to return UFT teachers to their normal classroom duties. Donovan fired McCoy the following day, after the unit administrator also declined to restore the teaching duties of the UFT members. Seven of the eight district principals were transferred for the same reason but were reinstated by the scrambling board within days.60 Donovan scrambled, too, floating a proposal to transfer all the teachers out of JHS 271 and reopen it as a high school. The board rejected the plan.61 Readers of local newspapers on October 8 were greeted with a UFT ad lamenting “the violent campaign of [UFT teacher] harassment” in OHB and the lack of action “to restore teachers’ rights.” In this vacuum, “vigilantes, racist extremists, and ordinary crackpots have been emboldened to abandon other pet projects and direct their concentrated, bizarre efforts toward the school system,” the UFT declared. “If teachers can be terrorized into submission to vigilantism,” then local school boards, parents associations, and “your children

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can be terrorized,” the union warned.62 After further conflicts between the two groups of teachers on October 9 and confrontations between protestors outside 271, Donovan closed the school. His decision to reopen the school the next day and return the seven principals to their OHB posts rankled Shanker. On October 14, the third strike began. Mayor Lindsay raged at the UFT on his television program: “You have the brute power. You do not have the moral right to make the children and parents of New York the victims of your own short-­sightedness. You do not have the right to take a single school in a single district and use it to cripple this city.” The UFT continued its media offensive with more newspaper ads. In one, Fred Nauman, who as the union rep for JHS 271 was the most prominent of the nineteen teachers dismissed in May, contended that “avowed racists are teaching impressionable children. These children are being indoctrinated into a program of hatred of the police and all constitutional authority.”63 During the final strike, two contrasting rallies took place three days apart. On Monday, October 14, a pro-­community-­control rally at City Hall turned into a spontaneous march across the Brooklyn Bridge. The array of people and political viewpoints encompassed in the rally and march was breathtaking. “Joining with our teachers and parents were their counterparts from other school districts who opposed the strike, high school and college students, and activists of all stripes from all over the city,” Isaacs writes. Mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP, mainstream-­turned-­radical organizations like CORE and SNCC, and more incendiary groups such as the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa took part. The crowd was roughly half white.64 For some of the key players, the rally was the crest of the community-­control wave. Rhody McCoy later reflected: Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge was, in my judgment, the greatest moment in my life. That I was amongst the people who felt I was doing a good job and supported it and who were committed to the education of Black kids. And secondly that there were just so many youngsters there. I mean a lot of youngsters, cheering and orderly and in support of the program and the project and their parents. And then of course we were kind of apprehensive and had some fear because we heard that there was going to be some trouble. There were agents, CIA agents, or whatever they were in there, [who] were going to create some problems. And we were sort of nude. Because the police refused to escort us across the bridge.65 

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Reverend Oliver had similarly warm memories of the day: “I was very struck by so many people coming out in support of the Governing Board and they were from all over the city, all races—­Black, White, and all shades in between. It was a very, very great day. I think that was the height of our experience at Ocean Hill–­Brownsville.”66  The October 15 edition of the New York Times included a full-­page ad purchased by the UFT to defend its decision to strike once again. “Should life in the classroom be guided by people who are responsibly concerned with education—­or should educational policy and practice be dictated by an assortment of miscellaneous ‘militants’ like those now performing at school doors and in school corridors?” the union asked. When UFT teachers returned to OHB schools at the end of the last strike, “teaching returned to normal,” with most of the replacement teachers welcoming their return, the ad stated. In contrast, at JHS 271, “McCoy’s teacher partisans used classrooms for hate sessions against returning teachers. . . . Some were subjected to the crude humiliation of assignment to a lecture on how to read. . . . Others were isolated in empty classrooms. Those attempting to join their classes were assailed by obscenities and threats.” Outsiders and replacement teachers harassed and threatened union members, the UFT alleged.67 The following day, the entire OHB staff of loyal teachers released a statement that dismissed the UFT account as “nonsense.” The staff was particularly incensed by the UFT claim that “teaching returned to normal” at district schools: The return of the 83 “UFT” teachers did, in a sense return the schools to “NORMAL.” Should one consider it “NORMAL” that schools in Black and Puerto Rican communities be blocked and surrounded by police; that it is “NORMAL” that Black and Puerto Rican parents are brusquely denied entry to the schools where their children are educated; that it is “NORMAL” that Black and Puerto Rican children see and are frightened by nightsticks (swinging) and riot helmets glistening in the rooms and playgrounds of their schools. Is this what the “UFT” considers “NORMAL”? What was not “NORMAL” was that the people of Ocean Hill/Brownsville were beginning to assert their right to have a voice in one of the public institution[s] that greatly affect their lives. What was not “NORMAL” was that in this district Black and Puerto Rican children were beginning to see that they could learn and that each of them has special beauty and worth. It is these “abnormalities” that the UFT evidently seeks to crush.68

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On Thursday, September 17, the UFT and CSA staged their own rally at City Hall. Leaflets accused McCoy’s staff of “teaching the three ‘R’s’ of Racism, Rioting and Revolution.” This would have come as news to the teachers and students at 271. The crowd was virtually all white, save for one of the few remaining African Americans who publicly supported the UFT, Bayard Rustin. Shanker cried: “We are not about to let our school system be taken over by Nazi types and gangsters!” The irony was not lost on Isaacs, as the virtually all-­white crowd railed against supposed racism in OHB schools, while the integrated community-­control marchers supported the right to Black self-­determination. It’s obvious that Shanker did not, if it meant a violation of teachers’ rights: “Even if 100% of a community wants to fire teachers without due process, it’s exactly the same as 100% of the citizens of Mississippi voting to legalize lynching.” Clearly, Black residents of the city did not warm to Shanker’s false equivalence of lynching with the possibility that racist or incompetent teachers could be dismissed or transferred more easily by local school boards. According to Marc Dollinger, the teachers union, “composed of a large number of Jews, worried that local control would compromise the quality and integrity of public education as well as threaten the jobs of many white teachers whose job security would rest with local officials indifferent to rules of seniority.”69 Teaching represented a rung on the ladder to middle-­class respectability; the prospect of that rung disappearing provoked a sense of vulnerability. Around this time, Charlie Isaacs received a package that included two leaflets printed on a single page of paper. A note at the top asked him to “circulate to your Jewish colleagues.” At the bottom was printed: “Is this what you want for your children? The UFT says No!” The more incendiary of the two leaflets warned its readers about “the so-­called liberal Jewish friend” with his “tricky, deceitful maneuvers”—­“the Middle East murderers of colored people”—­“the money changers” and “bloodsucking exploiters” who were “responsible for the serious educational retardation of our black children.” The UFT circulated over half a million copies throughout the city. To this day, Isaacs and many others have grave doubts about the authenticity of the leaflet, which supposedly had been placed in the mailboxes of teachers at JHS 271 and PS 144 in OHB. Isaacs had never found the leaflet in his work mailbox, nor had he met anyone who had. Separate advertisements in the New York Times by the Governing Board and by 70 percent of loyal OHB teachers disavowed the leaflet, but the UFT’s effort to stoke fear in the Jewish community was distressingly effective. Shanker argued

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that the union should not “make believe this garbage doesn’t exist,” comparing the UFT’s action to Martin Luther King Jr. reproducing Ku Klux Klan propaganda to expose the organization’s virulent racism.70 By the time the break for the December holidays rolled around, the OHB community would have to squint hard to envision a scenario in which the state legislature would enact a robust decentralization law, much less one that granted authentic community control, in the coming spring. With its strong lobbying influence, the UFT would see to that. The two final death rattles would come on the radio and in the newspaper. On December 26, Leslie Campbell appeared on a small listener-­supported radio station, WBAI, as the guest of host Julius Lester. Lester asked Campbell to read a poem written by fifteen-­year-­old Sia Berhan. “You got to be crazy,” Campbell replied. “I want you to read this on the air so people know what feelings the strike has produced in one black child,” Lester said, convincing Campbell. The poem, dedicated to Al Shanker, began: “Hey, Jew boy, with that / Yarmulka on your head / You, pale-­faced Jew boy / I wish you were dead.” After a number of listeners called in to express their objections to the reading of the poem, Lester explained: “I hope that [hearing the young woman’s thoughts] will properly cause people to do some self-­examination and react as you have reacted. An ugly poem, yes, but not one-­half as ugly as what happened in school strikes, not one-­hundredth as what some teachers said to some of those black children.” Believing listener reactions to the poem were valuable and would spur dialogue between Blacks and Jews, Lester played a recording of the poem on two subsequent episodes of his weekly show. (Lester, whose great-­grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, converted to Judaism in 1982.)71 The story did not appear on the public radar until January 16, when the New York Times reported that the UFT had filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against the station and reiterated its call for Campbell’s firing. A sizable contingent from the newly formed Jewish Defense League, a right-­wing, heavily armed organization, descended upon WBAI, waving clubs and evidently attempting to loosen the elevator cable. Despite the extensive coverage of the explosive poem, Lester was contacted by only two media outlets for comment; no one contacted Campbell and Berhan to understand their perspectives.72 Shanker was not one to miss an opportunity, claiming that “if community control as we see it in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville wins, there will be ‘Jew Bastard’ signs and swastikas in all the schools.”73

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Another slow-­breaking story in the Times had been published on January 5 concerning a November 1968 editorial in the African-­American Teachers Forum, the bimonthly publication of the organization that Albert Vann headed. It asked how long Black and Puerto Rican communities would “sit back and allow the Jewish-­dominated United Federation of Teachers to destroy our effort to rescue our children from those incompetent teachers whose only goal—­aside from receiving fat paychecks—­is stifling our children’s intellectual growth?” It insisted, “Don’t tell us any more about the 6 million slaughtered by Hitler. Tell us instead about the 12 million Blacks slaughtered in 300 years of Black genocide.” The editorial accused “the Jew, our liberal friend of yesterday,” of now being “our exploiter. He keeps our women and children from becoming teachers and principals and he keeps our children ignorant.”74 Two days earlier, the chairman of the Brownsville Model Cities Committee denounced Jewish leaders for seeking “to perpetuate their greedy rape of the city under the guise of unionism and ‘teacher rights.’”75 Shanker’s claim that OHB was a cesspool of anti-­Semitism was echoed in a January 23 report by the Anti-­Defamation League. Charlie Isaacs was incensed at the report, which ultimately “could not cite even one anti-­Semitic action, only a few defamatory remarks. . . . The report quoted a few threatening letters as though these were evidence of an anti-­Semitic tsunami. Nowhere did it acknowledge the thousands of threatening letters sent by Jews to McCoy or to Rev. Oliver (or even to me).” Isaacs prepared a response that was co-­signed by nineteen fellow Jewish teachers at JHS 271, roughly half the Jewish teaching contingent at the school. (Isaacs said he could have obtained more signatures but felt that releasing the letter was urgent.) The statement praised Leslie Campbell’s exemplary teaching skills and Vann’s talent at administration, denying that either was anti-­Semitic. The signatories urged that New York City “not be diverted from fighting what is still our society’s most basic sickness: White Racism.” Their challenge went unaccepted. And Isaacs received a voluminous new batch of hate mail.76 The Decentralization Law Kills Community Control The UFT really did not require additional ammunition for the upcoming decentralization debate, but it received it anyway in a highly slanted and often inaccurate depiction of the OHB situation by the journalist Martin Mayer. Mayer’s book, The Teachers Strike, was published in early 1969, preceded by a lengthy excerpt in the New York Times Magazine. This “mischievous little piece of pro-­UFT

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propaganda,” as Isaacs deems it, includes no attribution. Isaacs identifies a number of factual errors and distortions in Mayer’s account, which blames the OHB Governing Board for instigating the four UFT strikes of 1967–­68 and blocking all avenues to reconciliation.77 Robert L. Carter, a prominent, long-­time attorney for the NAACP (1944–­ 1968) who was appointed to the federal bench in 1972 by President Nixon and served nearly four decades, wrote a blistering critique of Mayer’s article to the Times: “Reading Martin Mayer’s evidently authoritative and purportedly objective investigation of the decentralization controversy, we discover that all the black figures—­McCoy, Oliver, Wright, Galamison, Clark, Young, and Rivers—­ are liars, villains, dupes, vacillators, and just plain ineffectual. Measured against these men, Albert Shanker, along with several other white participants, towers as a mountain of strength, effectiveness, determination, high-­mindedness, shrewdness, and responsibility.” Later, Carter affirmed that “I have never read a document full of more blatantly anti-­black inferences and innuendos. This document clearly qualifies as racial defamation.” As the state legislature debated the decentralization bill, every member received a copy of Mayer’s attack on Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, courtesy of the UFT.78 On April 30, 1969, the state legislature passed a decentralization law that largely hewed to Shanker’s wishes. The Board of Examiners, which administered the exams that sorted teaching and administrative aspirants into a ranked list, survived. Hiring decisions would continue to be made among the three top-­ranked names on the list. Shanker had agreed to a modification of existing rules whereby districts that were in the 45th percentile or lower in city reading scores could hire any candidate who passed the National Teacher Examination. Local boards were prohibited from transferring teachers to another district involuntarily. A new, seven-­person Board of Ed—­with appointees from each of the five borough presidents and two from the mayor—­would replace Lindsay’s appointments who were favorable to some iteration of community control. The city would be partitioned into approximately thirty large school districts with at least twenty thousand students. OHB was folded into District 23. Community control was dead. When elections for the District 23 school board were held in March 1970, a slate led by local assemblyman and political hack Samuel Wright swept to victory. Turnout was the lowest in the city at 5 percent, in part because

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McCoy and the Governing Board had urged a boycott of the election. The new board took over in July.79 Surely, the UFT’s lobbying muscle was key in shaping the decentralization law, but other legislative activity in Albany indicated that the state legislature and Governor Nelson Rockefeller were decidedly uninclined to stand for low-­ income Black and Brown communities. On March 29, Rockefeller signed legislation pushed by Republican majorities in the legislature that slashed funding for welfare and Medicaid. Assemblyman Edward A. Stevenson, a Black Democrat from the Bronx, labeled it “an anti-­Negro bill, an anti-­Puerto Rican bill, and an anti-­poor people bill.”80 Two days after the decentralization law passed, Rockefeller signed an anti-­ busing bill that prohibited the State Commissioner of Education or any nonelected local school board from transferring students to a district other than their home district without the consent of their parents. The governor had been widely expected to veto the bill. Ironically, the legislature also enacted a law proclaiming January 15 to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the state.81 The twin actions mirrored the long-­standing course of the NYC Board of Education: integration in principle but not in practice. Less than a year later, Southerners in the US Senate, led by the unabashed segregationists John Stennis (D-­MS) and Strom Thurmond (D-­SC), pushed for adoption of an anti-­busing provision that was nearly identical to the law signed by Rockefeller, who Senator Sam Ervin (D-­NC) referred to pointedly as “that great liberal in the field of civil rights.”82 What Was Lost When UFT teachers returned to Ocean Hill–­Brownsville schools, many students felt they had been sent back to the “bad old days” of classrooms filled with indifferent teachers who cared little for them. Monifa Edwards, the daughter of Black Caribbean immigrants, had not had a great experience in elementary school, first attending a local school on double session (resulting in an abbreviated school day), then being bused to a white school in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, where “an angry mob swarmed and shook our school bus.” She vowed to attend junior high school in her neighborhood.83 Recalling the return of the union teachers, Edwards stated: “For us, we felt if you were with the UFT, that you weren’t with us. I would say at a certain point . . . you were the enemy.” This was a stark contrast to the period when JHS 271 was staffed strictly by the loyal

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teachers, a time when Edwards said she received “the best education I received in my life.” Edwards emphasized that students were not taught a slanted version of Black history: “It was all real. It wasn’t like they were then saying, ‘Oh, now we are the greatest people. . . .’ But it just rounded it out. . . . I guess you can’t even fathom it because until you realize that you’ve been written out of history, you don’t realize how much more you have to be written in.” She acknowledged that some viewed the teaching of Black history as “a threat. Whenever a class is being taught African history, somehow it’s deemed that they’re learning to hate another group.” Edwards was part of a close-­knit circle of “nerdy, well-­spoken, Black and Puerto Rican women” who named themselves the Brooklyn Five. Sufia de Silva, also part of the group, had a similar recollection: “You know a lot of people at that time thought that maybe they were teaching like hatred for whites but it was never anything like that. It wasn’t about hating another culture or race. It was about learning to love your own.”84  Veronica Gee, another member of the friendship circle that continues to this day, transferred to JHS 271, across the street from her home, despite the chaotic atmosphere outside the school that had been engendered by the UFT strikes. Up to that point in her school career, she had not had a single Black teacher. In 1969, 32 percent of New York City public school students and 9 percent of teachers were Black; 21 percent of students were Puerto Rican, but only 1 percent of the teaching staff was. At 271, Gee recalled there were “about ten or twelve [Black teachers]—­it was like it was a black school. . . . I knew that there were highly educated black people in the world but not in Brownsville. OK? . . . They were in the better places in the world.” Having Black teachers, she remarked, “made me feel like somebody was on my side.”85 Gee’s mother was Irish and Italian; her father was “colored and Indian.” Gee endured taunts that her mother was “white trash” and a “n—­—­lover.” (Gee recalled: “My mom owned all of it. She was like, ‘Hell fuckin’ yeah, that’s who I am.”) JHS 271, Gee recalled, “gave me a sense of pride. I no longer felt ashamed to be a half-­breed, which is what they used to call me, every day.”86 Sonia Cotto-­Moreno, a Puerto Rican woman whose mother became the first Hispanic parent representative at the Board of Ed, said that “it didn’t matter what color you were [at JHS 271]. They instilled pride in you, and that was the beauty of the message.”87 Cleaster Cotton, a Black woman who was the student president at JHS 271, lauded her teachers who “worked diligently to reverse the

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humiliating and abusive effects of malicious instructional design.” She added, “Black power, being Black and proud, it’s not racist, it’s a birthright . . . that assists us in reclaiming our human rights.”88 Significantly, this newly discovered pride in one’s own identity took place in a school where the teaching staff was 70 percent white and where some of the transformed students were typically viewed as not “authentically” African American, but Puerto Rican or multiracial. The profundity of student experiences is all the more striking given the brief period of time—­late spring 1968 and fall 1968—­during which they were taught only by the loyal teachers and parent volunteers, without the UFT teachers whom they believed were often unable or unwilling to foster learning, curiosity, and pride in their students. Edwards recounted that “271 became an oasis that allowed us to be children rather than walking labels of disadvantage and targeted prejudice.” Her white math teacher, Charlie Isaacs, “radiated respect and love for us,” and so the students learned. In contrast, union teacher Fred Nauman “got the jungle bunnies he expected.”89 On June 13, 1969, Edwards, the school valedictorian, gave a graduation address to the eighth-­grade class at JHS 271. Her words still sear five decades later. Our ancestors were brutally forced to an unknown land, to be enslaved and looked down upon as animals by the white man.  They were separated from their tribes and unable to speak to their own people because of language barriers. Forced to speak the language of the oppressors, they have since that time been struggling from what was considered the lowest of worldly creatures, slaves in bondage, to achieve a respected place in the world. . . . Today, though no longer in legal slavery, black people are still technically in bondage. Our minds and spirits are enslaved and still in shackles. We must struggle to break the shackles and chains that bind our minds. Though we long to be free, we must learn to be free.

While at one point cautioning against the “‘hate whitey’ bag that so many of us developing awareness fall into,” Edwards closed by urging her fellow “Black and Puerto Rican students” to “Be BLACK, be BEAUTIFUL, be BRILLIANT and be YOURSELF!”90 At 271 and the other schools in the OHB district, celebrations of Blackness did not negate a spirit of multiculturalism in the name of self-­determination for oppressed communities. In fall 1968, the OHB schools developed a curriculum

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that wove together Black and Puerto Rican histories and included bilingual teachers to help Spanish-­speaking students. The director of the initiative described the goal to “integrate cultures by expressing diversity that is inherent in unity. We will infuse every phase of the curriculum with Afro-­American and Hispanic studies.”91 The Governing Board, which at the time was 73 percent Black and 16 percent Puerto Rican, created the first bilingual program in city schools at PS 155, where one-­quarter of the students were Puerto Rican. Both Black and Puerto Rican students enrolled in the classes; some were taught in only English or Spanish, while others combined both languages. Students were also given lessons in Swahili. After the program showed positive outcomes and Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, Puerto Rican educators successfully created the first bilingual school in the Northeast, at PS 25 in the South Bronx.92 Educators at the IS 201 complex in Harlem pursued a similarly integrated curriculum. As Russell Rickford recounts: “Bilingual classes, still rare in New York City at the time, included exploration of the Taino Indian and African roots of Puerto Rican culture, as well as discussion of Spanish colonialism and American imperialism. Students sang Puerto Rico’s anthem (La Borinqueña) in Spanish. They traced links between African and Puerto Rican dance styles and culinary habits.” Kweli, the newspaper of the IS 201 complex, was printed in Spanish and English.93 Zipporiah Mills was a second grader in East New York, “right next door to Brownsville,” during the fall of 1968. “When we got back to school, things had changed,” she remembered. “For the first time, I grew up in a school where Black History Week was really something when teachers switched their curriculum. . . . I [had] white teachers who made sure that we read books with Black characters, by Black writers. That stuff wasn’t taught at home—­not the Black characters in books, but who George Washington Carver was.” She recalled learning “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black national anthem. In addition, “there were obviously not enough, but they were hiring more Black teachers in our school. And I remember all the kids would be so excited if you got the Black teacher. . . . I didn’t know what we were all doing, but we were celebrating, seeing someone who looked like us, someone who had the same values and morals and spoke the same language as our parents. [They had] the same history: many came from the South and had migrated here.”94

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The reverberations from the community-­control movement ascended to the high school and college levels. During a three-­week period in spring 1969, the Board of Ed reported “eighty serious fires, riots or disruptive demonstrations at thirty-­eight high schools or junior high schools.” The disorders were, at least in part, traced to student support of demands made by a coalition of Black and Puerto Rican students. These included creation of a student-­faculty council in every high school that would guide the hiring and firing of staff and changes to the curriculum.95 Also that spring, a multiracial student movement that spread throughout the City University of New York system called for bold and immediate changes to prevailing admissions standards, faculty hiring, and curriculum, among other issues. City College, in Harlem, had a Black student population of 4 percent and a Puerto Rican population of 5 percent. Brooklyn College was 96 percent white. Few students from the city’s struggling high schools were able to meet the exacting admissions standards of the four-­year CUNY schools. A 1964 report found that the senior colleges in CUNY enrolled a thousand Black students. Louisiana, with a similarly sized Black population, enrolled over ten times as many Black students in its state colleges. In 1967, less than 4 percent of students eligible for admission to CUNY were Black.96 The Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program had been created at CUNY in 1966 to offer access and extra support for low-­income students, who were woefully underrepresented and disproportionately Black and Puerto Rican. Governor Rockefeller’s attempt to shrink SEEK funding in the state budget escalated the student commitment to open up CUNY to all of the city’s graduating high school seniors, regardless of race or financial status. In the face of roiling student protests throughout the system, the city’s Board of Higher Education moved the start date of the Open Admissions policy from 1975 to 1970 and increased the number of seats at the senior colleges. The thirty-­ five thousand first-­year students who entered CUNY in 1970 represented a 75 percent increase from the prior year. One-­quarter of the new enrollees were Black and Latino, an enormous jump. Open Admissions policies would later become more restrictive, and the city’s dire fiscal crisis led to the first-­time imposition of tuition in 1975. Nevertheless, the legacies of the changes forged by multiracial student activism at CUNY continue to give a second chance to the many students whose first chance at a quality education in the K–­12 years has been denied them.97

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Despite the heated debates over whether Open Admissions represented CUNY’s retreat from excellence, the victory by student activists in this fight—­ and also in opening up the curriculum to histories and cultures that stretched beyond Europe and the US, among other gains—­raises the question of why this fight for integration and inclusion in New York saw a degree of success at the college level but gained so little traction at younger levels of education. Perhaps the key distinction is this: while many whites viewed K–­12 school integration as being stuck with a losing hand in a zero-­sum game, Open Admissions offered something tangible to their children. As Joshua Freeman recounts: “Between 1969 and 1972 the percentage of minority students in the freshman class nearly tripled. But in absolute numbers, the jump in white students easily surpassed the increase in minority entrants. Of all the ethnic groups in the city, Italian-­ Americans made the greatest gains.”98 Moreover, if racist white students blanched at the prospect of attending a racially diverse college, they easily could find an overwhelmingly white college to attend . . . assuming they could afford the self-­ imposed “racism tax” to attend a private college or a public institution some distance from New York City. The Aftermath The experiments in the three demonstration districts ended too quickly to provide any definitive verdict on whether authentic community control of schools offered a path forward for urban education. After their demise, the focus of school battles often returned to integration, and a number of white communities continued to resist the enrollment of Black students who, in their view, should be placed in other schools. For example, in fall 1972, a group of students who lived in Brooklyn’s Tilden Houses were unable to attend school until late October, as the central board dithered in its fumbling attempts to place them in schools that would accept them. The board wavered between placing the students in overwhelmingly white schools, where they might be treated with rancor, or schools with sizable Black populations, where resegregation might occur (see chapter 7).99 In some respects, the board’s approaches to integration and community control represented similar strategies of administrative checkpoints: launch small-­scale demonstration projects intended to mollify Black and Puerto Rican families who, it was hoped, would regard the experiments as meaningful first steps, while calming white fears of drastic changes that would upend the

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education of their children. As the brief experiments with community control unfolded, its supporters came to understand very clearly that playing by the board’s fuzzy “rules” of what it considered appropriate or permissible would bring only humiliation or failure. It was more dignified to foul out than adhere to the rules of a rigged game. Though the board and the schools superintendent were never supportive of authentic community control of schools and likely harbored deep regrets about how the experiments had unfolded, one can grasp how a tightly constrained version of community control might have held some allure. Perhaps most importantly, it offered politicians and education officials a rationale to turn away from the contentious issue of integration. The only path to widespread integration required centralized intervention to distribute the one million public school students across the schools of the city. If there existed a hypothetical integration plan that parents of all races and classes would buy into, the educational bureaucracy never came close to uncovering it. As Black and Puerto Rican students annually filled more of the seats of exiting whites, the mathematical challenges of achieving stable integration multiplied. Ironically, and despite UFT rhetoric to the contrary, the community-­control experiment in OHB provided hints about how integrated schools might flourish. Black and Puerto Rican parents and staff did not reject white teachers, so long as they came with a firm belief in their students’ ability to learn and a commitment to treating their Black and Brown pupils and colleagues with genuine respect and collegiality. Charlie Isaacs recalled, “Even though the culture was Black nationalist, the white teachers were never disrespected because they were white. Those of us that were effective were really welcomed. But when I went there I didn’t know whether to expect that. I’d been warned that white teachers wouldn’t be welcome, and that Al Vann and Jitu [Leslie Campbell] were people I should be afraid of. But the reality was just the opposite.”100 Nationalism in a multicultural environment also found expression in the Young Lords Organization (YLO), a Puerto Rican–­led activist group in which around a quarter of members were African American and that also included a substantial number of Afro–­Puerto Ricans. The New York branch of the organization, modeled on the Black Panther Party, first emerged in the summer of 1969 with the Garbage Offensive, a series of dramatic public actions demanding that the city rectify poor sanitation services in East Harlem.101

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As YLO and the Panthers can attest, marginalized groups that attempt to seize power can expect that those standing in opposition will not hesitate to “fight dirty.” In the late ’80s, Al Shanker tacitly admitted that his attempts to crush community control were motivated less by a desire to capture the reality of what was going on in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville than his quest to win at all costs: “Anti-­Semitism . . . certainly had nothing to do with starting the strike. And it had nothing to do with keeping the strike going. And it had nothing to do with the settlement. It had an awful lot to do with how people came to see the strike in public terms.”102 Shanker’s ex post facto confession did nothing to mitigate the immense damage of his public relations strategy on the community control experiment. Even if he had been convinced that community control would meaningfully improve the education of Black and Puerto Rican children, there is no reason to believe he would have sacrificed union power to achieve this aim. Building union power was his job and his passion. As for Mayor Lindsay, education officials, and the Board of Ed—­whatever their various sympathies were with the players in the drama—­at the end of the day they surely realized that either community control would have to be crushed or they would face an indefinite future of teacher strikes and disruptions. The political choice was not difficult.

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of the 1960s, the military entanglement in Vietnam, Black Power and white resentment, multiple assassinations, urban rebellions, campus unrest, and increasing crime all contributed to a climate of unease and uncertainty about the future. During a 1967 interview on WNBC’s Searchlight, Kenneth Clark observed that in the fight for racial equality, there is a “constant battle between hope and despair, and hope must always be a little more than despair so that you can keep battling.” He added that recent symptoms of racial unrest, including the 1964 uprisings, suggested that hope was not receding, because “people who are totally hopeless don’t fight back, don’t make demands.”1 At the same time, it had become increasingly apparent that most people who lived outside segregated, low-­income neighborhoods had no concern for these areas nor their inhabitants, save one: keep those people away from me. Clark’s earlier warnings that containing ghetto problems (drug abuse, crime, tenuous connection to the labor force, and so on) was infeasible and that dispersing these problems was the only solution convinced few skeptics.2 On the evening of October 24, 1968, eleven days before the presidential election, an excited crowd entered Madison Square Garden. The attendees were there to see presidential candidate George Wallace, the former (and future) Alabama governor seeking white voters who shared his contempt for Black people, anti-­war hippies, welfare cheats, bureaucrats, and others whose patriotism or “Americanness” was found wanting. Outside the arena, around three thousand police officers attempted to prevent explosive confrontations between Wallace supporters—­including a contingent of Klan members who had driven from Louisiana and members of the American Nazi Party—­and some two thousand protestors, who were shouted down as “Commie faggots.” A group of anti-­Wallace youths had taken Confederate flags from supporters, lighting them to shouts of “Burn, baby, burn,” a chant associated with the 1965 Watts revolt. IN THE LATTE R H A L F

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Attendance was estimated at sixteen thousand. Around one hundred anti-­ Wallace individuals were admitted into the ticketed event, perhaps intentionally as fodder for Wallace’s regular applause lines. Long-­haired white youths got most of it: “Come on down, I’ll autograph your sandals,” he offered. “Hey there, sweetie. Oh, excuse me . . . I thought you were a girl.” More alarmingly, three Black protestors, one of whom used a bullhorn to denounce the candidate, were encircled by a dozen Wallace supporters threatening to kill them. Attendees punched several Black attendees, one of whom claimed to have been spat upon. Fifteen minutes into the talk, Wallace removed his jacket and forcefully offered his plan to end the rioting that had become a regular feature in American cities. Alabama did not have riots, he explained: “They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick get a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks, now!’” The police arrested five people at the rally and an additional twenty-­two outside; eleven civilians, three detectives, and a patrolman were injured. Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter deemed the New York rally “the emotional climax” of his 1968 campaign.3 A New York Times reporter detected a connection between the enthusiasm for Wallace and the discontent of the city’s civil servants, who were busy declining union contract offers, castigating Mayor Lindsay, “and bringing the city to the brink of chaos.” They felt financially squeezed, disrespected by people on the streets, and brushed aside by Lindsay, who held a dim view of unions and was seen as concerned primarily with poor Blacks and Puerto Ricans, at the expense of the white working class. In fact, the sizable Black and Puerto Rican working class was virtually invisible as they struggled to crack the ethnic monopolies that were common among civil servants and other unionized workers.4 Four years after widespread uprisings in Harlem and Bed-­Stuy, New York City had managed to avoid the massive turbulence that plagued hundreds of cities in 1968, stoked by rage over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Nevertheless, anger and frustration were never far from the surface. Puerto Ricans in East Harlem had clashed with police for two nights in July 1967, refuting stereotypes about their passivity in the face of police brutality and other injustices. On the second night, according to the Times, “mobs overturned automobiles and set them afire, looted stores, pulled fire alarms and pelted firemen and policemen with bricks and bottles.” Snipers fired at police from rooftops. Two East Harlem residents had been killed; at least twelve people, including three police officers,

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were injured. Lindsay insisted that what had transpired was a “disturbance,” not a riot. (Two years later, the Young Lords multifaceted campaign against oppression of Puerto Ricans in New York City could not be dismissed so easily.)5 In 1965, the Herald Tribune had detailed New York’s worsening problems in virtually all areas of civic life, labeling it a “city in crisis”: a “nightmare” for vulnerable populations and “a terrible place to live” for the young and middle class (of all races) “because of unsafe streets, poor schools, and inadequate housing.”6 Three years down the road, according to a Time cover story, the city had continued “sliding toward chaos.” It was November 1968. Two thousand police officers picketed outside City Hall, calling for Mayor Lindsay’s ouster. A “sick-­in” had resulted in one out of five officers staying home. Those on duty ignored illegally parked autos. Firefighters engaged in their own work slowdown, declining to inspect buildings or check fire hydrants and threatening a full-­on strike. Teachers were absent from their classrooms again over the Ocean Hill–­Brownsville situation, so most of the city’s one million public school students were on another impromptu extended break. This was not a simple labor conflict, a Lindsay aide warned: “There’s far more at stake. This could be the greatest tinderbox in the world.” New York City, the article observed, “is a pattern setter. If it should prove ungovernable or explode in bitterness, no other city could feel secure in a time of increasing racial and ethnic polarization.” Rents were becoming less and less affordable, traffic was suffocating, and garbage was accruing, making it “perhaps the most unkempt city on the North American continent.” The article was surprisingly sanguine about Ocean Hill–­Brownsville. One long-­time teacher explained that the community control experiment “has to work. It will work. In spite of everything that people are doing to crush this beautiful thing. We have been floating around in this sea of negativism for too long. People don’t have the courage to face the fact that the status quo just hasn’t worked. Instead, they get themselves frightened by such ideas as Black Power and militancy. It’s not that at all. It is just a simple matter of accountability.” Outside of that Brooklyn neighborhood, Time said, most Black students in the city “would probably be better off not even attending the typical New York school.” The report hearkened back to a demonstration the prior year in an East Harlem school, “where an elderly black woman, tears streaming down her face, cradled the head of her nine-­year-­old grandson and lamented, dirge-­like: ‘He don’t read! He don’t read! He don’t read!’” Time’s litany of ills was not matched by possible solutions. The

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core issue in New York and other large cities, the article concluded, was that they were simply too big to govern effectively. The suggestion to subdivide large cities into population units of one hundred thousand did not offer much realistic hope.7 Political Threats to Lindsay’s Liberalism In the 1969 mayoral race, incumbent John Lindsay’s two most threatening opponents argued that the first priority for the city should be a return to law and order. In June, Lindsay was defeated in the Republican primary by John Marchi, a quiet, conservative state senator who was virtually anonymous to city voters outside of Staten Island, which he represented. Perhaps his central claim to semi-­fame was having been a key player in crafting New York City school decentralization legislation. In New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, Timothy J. Sullivan emphasizes the significance of Marchi’s victory: “An unknown, underfinanced, charismatically challenged conservative candidate defeated one of the country’s leading liberal Republicans in a party primary.”8 Lindsay remained in the race on the Liberal ticket. In the Democratic primary, former three-­term mayor Robert Wagner Jr. lost to city Controller Mario Procaccino, who ran a campaign that struck many observers as trafficking in racism. George Wallace himself commented that Procaccino and Marchi were delivering speeches “like you hear in Alabama—­except they had New York accents.”9 Procaccino made an enduring contribution to the arsenal of pejorative political labels by dismissing Lindsay as a “limousine liberal”: a moneyed person who calls repeatedly for public policies to help the Black and Brown poor but whose personal wealth means that the cost of such interventions will exact no personal toll. If racial transition unfolded in neighborhoods of working-­and middle-­class whites and their worst fears were realized—­shrunken property values, crime spikes, and disorderly schools—­the limousine liberal would have no sympathy for them, whom he viewed as reactionary, small-­minded, and often racist. In language that speaks to the resentment against left-­leaning elites, Marion Javits, spouse of the liberal Republican senator, bemoaned New Yorkers’ declining morale: “More than ever, the people are not lovely, or gentle, or likely to say ‘excuse me.’ It’s as though New York no longer feels loved.”10 The Democratic nominee gave voice to the fear and bitterness of nonaffluent whites who had remained in the city. Journalists often delighted in having fun at the expense of Procaccino, chubby and short, with blocky, horn-­rimmed

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glasses, slicked-­back hair, and an oft-­remarked pencil mustache, hailing “from the distant eastern marches of the Bronx.” Time observed: “He wears electric-­ blue suits and watermelon-­pink shirts and in speech and gesture accentuates the ethnic.”11 The fifty-­six-­year-­old former municipal and civil court judge spent many hours campaigning in white neighborhoods outside Manhattan, urging that the city “stop coddling the criminals and pampering the punks. The do-­ gooders and bleeding hearts must stop handcuffing the police.” New York City at 3:00 a.m. was more dangerous than Vietnam, he alleged. As for maintaining safety in his own home, Procaccino vowed that if a burglar entered, “I’d just blow his brains out.”12 Procaccino objected to characterizations of him as racist: “I don’t care what a person is, what race or religion. . . . I say I’m for you, whatever you are—­but you’ve got to behave yourself, and I tell it to everybody, black and white, straight out.”13 African Americans and Puerto Ricans remained unconvinced. A campaign appearance in Harlem found him “roundly heckled—­to the glee of his staff which planned to capitalize on the publicity,” the Amsterdam News reported.14 This was a tactic out of the Wallace playbook. The Alabaman welcomed hecklers: “You get me a million votes every time you show up, I’ll tell you that much,” he taunted an anti-­Wallace contingent at one of his rallies. Wallace finance director Seymore Terrell recalled that television coverage of Wallace trading barbs with antagonistic, long-­haired rally attendees caused campaign donations to pour in, especially from the South.15 Procaccino lacked Wallace’s rhetorical gifts. His reassurance to African Americans that “my heart is as black as yours!” predictably fell flat.16 Eleven days before the election, the controller returned to Harlem and taunted a hostile crowd: “Whether you like it or not, I’m going to be mayor of New York.” When that day comes, he promised, “there’ll be none of this nonsense, no more disruption of public meetings.” He had made the trip despite the warnings of CORE, which had announced that it would endorse none of the candidates and would chase the candidates from Harlem streets. At one point, Procaccino was asked if he was “anti-­black.” He answered in the negative. “Go home, you racist,” came the reply. Procaccino shot back: “I know what discrimination means. I’ve suffered as much as any of you.”17 A blue-­blooded, conventionally handsome WASP like Lindsay could never understand this experience, he felt. While Procaccino surely had experienced anti-­Italian bias while growing up, his equation of his

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experiences with far more pervasive and intense anti-­Blackness spoke to his misunderstanding of racial injustice in the United States. After a bruising campaign, Lindsay was reelected with 42 percent of the vote, Procaccino a distant second. Given the state of the city, few people other than the losing candidates envied Lindsay.18 The mayor himself wanted a job upgrade, throwing his hat into the ring for the 1972 presidential race as a Democrat. The campaign ended quickly after primary losses in Florida and Wisconsin. After serving two terms as New York’s mayor, he left Gracie Mansion on December 31, 1973.19 The “limousine liberal” tag would continue to serve as a rhetorical weapon for conservative politicians in the decades to come. Nationwide, popular white resistance to liberal interventions that sought to confront racial inequality would continue to build. Southern politicians saw an opening. A National School Desegregation Policy? NYC’s difficulties with school desegregation drew few white sympathizers in the South. In late 1960s Washington, as federal pressure intensified on Southern school districts to desegregate, politicians from that region began to complain with escalating fervor that a double standard prevailed: relentless pressure on the South to desegregate, coupled with a hands-­off approach to Northern segregation. These grievances took center stage in early 1970, when the arch-­segregationist Mississippi senator John Stennis and the liberal Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff became unlikely bedfellows in the call to have federal desegregation policies apply uniformly throughout the nation. Stennis had introduced an amendment to an education bill specifying that federal school desegregation standards “shall be applied uniformly in all regions of the United States without regard to the origin or cause of such segregation.”20 No one was under the illusion that the Mississippi segregationist had converted to integration. Rather, he, along with other Southern politicians, hoped that more aggressive desegregation enforcement outside the South would “spark a broader, national backlash against school desegregation.”21 During Senate debate, Stennis did not conceal his motives: “When my amendment is honestly applied, the people beyond the South will find out whether they want the system of integration. They are beginning to suspect they do not want it, and I think that would be a very salutary influence, if the people of the nation, black and white, can find an adjustment for this thing that does not destroy the schools, as they are doing down South.”22

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While surely aware of Stennis’s motives, Ribicoff took to the Senate floor to offer his support for his colleague’s contention that if public school segregation is wrong in the South, it is wrong outside the South as well: “The North is guilty of monumental hypocrisy in its treatment of the black man. Without question, Northern communities [have] been as systematic and consistent as Southern communities in denying to the black man and his children the opportunity that exists for the white people. The plain fact is that racism is rampant throughout the country.”23 Ribicoff ’s authentic desire to see America confront its hypocrisy on racial issues did not draw kudos from many civil rights organizations. NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins angrily declared that the senator had “beat[en] the White House for the honor of endorsing the raping of equality in education.”24 From Harlem, Preston Wilcox, the Black social worker who played a key role in the turn from integration to community control, suspected sinister motives. He accused Ribicoff of appealing stealthily to the “silent [white] majority,” with the aim of stimulating “the integration of Black students into white racist schools rather than to end the control of Black education by white racists.” Whites, Wilcox surmised, perceived the growing proportions of Black residents in center cities as “a political threat” and wished to disperse them throughout metropolitan areas. (If this was the underlying plan, it failed entirely.) Wilcox’s vision of concentrating Black political power in the urban core would “not make Senator Stennis or Mississippi happy,” since whites would not be excluded from Black-­majority schools and those schools would be under Black control—­which was not the case currently, even in segregated Black schools.25 If Congress did not act, Ribicoff predicted, “years of litigation will only establish that there is no real distinction between law-­imposed, de jure segregation (Southern style) and neighborhood-­imposed, de facto segregation (the Northern version).”26 The Supreme Court would disagree in Milliken v. Bradley (1974) (418 U.S. 717), in which it found the vast majority of suburban governments to be free from culpability for residential segregation within their borders and thus under no obligation to desegregate by accepting students from outside town lines. Thus, as Gary Orfield observes, residentially segregated suburban locales were not compelled to integrate their schools, whereas urban locales that had not excluded African Americans and other people of color faced pressure to integrate. While many suburban towns had few or no black students to accommodate, many

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urban centers had experienced serious declines in the white population, making numerically integrated education nearly as untenable. Pointing to Boston’s brutal struggles over school desegregation, James Ryan explains that “busing students within the city . . . often meant transporting poor white and poor black students from shoddy, single-­race schools to shoddy, somewhat integrated schools.”27 Clearly, New York was not alone among big cities in its struggles with school integration measures. Ribicoff proclaimed that “massive school segregation does not exist because we have segregated our schools but because we have segregated our society and our neighborhoods.” Noting that job and housing opportunities were now found largely in the suburbs, Ribicoff contended that “we cannot solve our ‘urban crisis’ unless we include the suburbs in the solution.”28 The dilemma was that pressing for racial and economic integration of the suburbs would make the heated debate over school busing seem tepid in comparison and would leave many members of Congress looking for new jobs.29 President Nixon hedged on the Stennis amendment. While he had consistently criticized differential treatment of the South in civil rights matters, as an ardent foe of busing he had no desire to see the federal government expand its use exponentially to attack segregation in metropolitan areas throughout the nation. White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler told reporters that the president supported “the concept” of the Stennis plan but declined to say whether he would support congressional passage of the amendment. He remarked: “Just as the Administration is opposed to a dual school system of education in any part of the United States, the Administration is also opposed to a dual system of justice in the United States.”30 Hidden beneath this vague statement of fair play lay a vexing puzzle: If one argues that the South is different due to its history of legally mandated school segregation, then that region must be treated differently. But if one is saying that segregation is segregation, regardless of the causes, then the South and non-­South should be treated the same, which would mean a relaxation of enforcement in the South or a dramatic ramping up of desegregation efforts in the non-­South. The political landscape at the time indicated that the former possibility was far more likely. The Senate passed the Stennis amendment on February 18, 1970, by a 56–­36 vote, but Senate liberals successfully changed the amendment in the House-­ Senate conference committee to specify that the amendment did not mitigate

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the obligations of HEW to cut off funding (under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act) where a history of de jure segregation was found. By this time, the administration had “all but abandoned” funding cutoffs, claiming it was shifting its strategy to Justice Department litigation, but little action was happening on that front either.31 In spring 1971, the Senate again passed the Stennis amendment, which was watered down in the conference committee.32 This time, Ribicoff upped the ante for Southern conservatives and Northern liberals alike by proposing a two-­part bill intended to break down boundaries that had become more important than those between the South and non-­South—­those between cities and suburbs. Part one would require all schools in a metropolitan area to have a percentage of minority students that was at least half the percentage of minority students residing in the whole metropolitan area. Schools would have twelve years to reach this goal incrementally, risking the loss of all federal aid if they did not make required progress. Part two would prohibit government agencies or government contractors from locating in a community unless it had sufficient low-­ and moderate-­income housing to accommodate all of their employees. Given that most large companies had government contracts, many localities would be required to relax restrictive zoning laws or take other steps to assure an adequate supply of housing if they wished industry to locate within their borders.33 Liberals who had withstood Southern charges of hypocrisy on desegregation delighted that the tables had been turned: “We’ll have a chance to see who the hypocrites are when that amendment comes up,” Senator Walter Mondale crowed.34 The NAACP still was not buying what Ribicoff was selling. The organization’s highly influential lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, complained that the twelve-­year window to comply would give more opportunity for the “footdraggers and obstructionists” to “think of new schemes” to avoid desegregation. The Swann v. Charlotte-­Mecklenburg (402 U.S. 1) decision, a North Carolina case in which the Supreme Court upheld the use of busing for desegregation, had been announced the previous day. Mitchell said the verdict had “reaffirmed our conviction that there are orderly ways of achieving the elimination of racial segregation in public schools. While we have no interest in reopening the Civil War, we must point out that no amount of talk about hypocrisy in the north can excuse the studied and effective southern exclusion of black children from integrated schools in that region.” Ribicoff dismissed Mitchell’s position as being driven by the

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lobbyist’s desire not to offend white, liberal Northerners who contributed to the organization.35 The Connecticut senator also set his sights on his liberal colleagues. New York Republican Jacob Javits, widely regarded as an ardent supporter of civil rights, had opposed the Ribicoff amendment, arguing that including it in the proposed $1.4 billion bill to aid school desegregation would unravel the tenuous compromise between liberal Democrats and the Nixon administration. In remarks that reportedly “stunned” Javits, Ribicoff looked directly at his counterpart on the Senate floor and accused him of lacking “the guts to face your liberal constituents who have moved to the suburbs to avoid sending their children to school with blacks.”36 Ribicoff laid out the case for addressing Northern-­style segregation, listing official actions that led to and perpetuated segregation. These included the drawing of school boundaries, decisions on school sites, zoning and land-­use policies, the use of eminent domain, FHA mortgage insurance programs, and federal highway and urban renewal programs. He pointed to intense segregation in the North, citing 1970 data showing that the city of Chicago was 33 percent Black, and its suburbs, 96 percent white. Baltimore’s population was 46 percent Black, and Washington’s was 71 percent Black, while their surrounding suburbs remained over 90 percent white. The same dynamic was occurring in the South.37 Big-­city mayors could see the benefits of merging with more affluent suburban school systems. Commenting on a March 1972 federal court order consolidating the primarily Black schools in Richmond, Virginia, with those in two more affluent, predominantly white, neighboring counties, Mayor Lindsay shared his belief that “all mayors who feel that their people are trapped by suburban political pressures and generally hostile state legislatures” support “breaking district lines.” However, he cautioned that urban-­suburban consolidation would be “difficult, if not impossible” without shifting school financing from local property taxes to the state and federal governments.38 Lindsay strongly backed busing in his 1972 presidential campaign. At home, however, Schools Chancellor Irving Anker alleged that Lindsay had neither privately nor publicly tried to encourage or discourage any integration program. If he did, board member (and former board president) Murray Bergtraum said, “we’d tell him to mind his own business.” Spokespersons for the mayor contended that he had stopped pressing the board on the issue several years ago

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after realizing his efforts were having no impact. Lindsay had even defended the board by explaining that it could only do so much, given the relatively small size of the white public school population. As for Lindsay’s contention that “the nonwhite community” had exerted “no pressure” for integration “because they know damn well” that the board “has tried like hell” to draw district lines to promote integration, David X. Spencer, the chair of the IS 201 Governing Board, deemed the comment “a damned lie.” In the poignant words of one Queens mother, “we have reached a point now where we have been begging and down on our knees asking for equality—­it’s just so humiliating that we can’t do it anymore.” Even at IS 201—­six years after the school had opened with an entirely Black and Puerto Rican population—­some adults held to the belief that integration would be beneficial. Bertrand Brown, the acting principal, speculated that if whites had been bused to the school, “the shooting galleries and drop-­off points [for drugs] might have been cleared up. And we might have gotten more money.” A New York Times report found a wide range of Black attitudes on integration in practice, in light of experiences with racism and relegation to lower, largely segregated academic tracks in numerically integrated schools.39 Two days after the Swann ruling, the Senate rejected the Ribicoff proposal, 51 to 35. All seven Democratic members who had been floated as potential nominees for president voted for the plan, though none spoke during floor debate. Other Northern liberals, such as Illinois senators Adlai Stevenson (Democrat) and Charles Percy (Republican), voted against. The Southern senators voting for the Ribicoff plan, fueled by another chance to expose Northern hypocrisy, came largely from states without sizable suburban constituencies. The following March, the Ribicoff measure lost votes in a 55-­to-­29 rejection.40 Political calculations played a prominent role in the debate over Ribicoff ’s proposal, but the potential execution of the Connecticut senator’s plan was unclear. Javits had cautioned that Ribicoff ’s proposal had not been studied sufficiently. Under the plan, metropolitan areas would be defined by the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). The New York senator explained that one SMSA extended from Harlem, with a very large Black population, 140 miles east to Suffolk County, which was overwhelmingly white: “We all know that we are never going to pass a bill that is going to make anybody bus a child from Harlem to Suffolk.” Javits went on to list enormous SMSAs—­including New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas, and Fresno—­that exceeded two thousand

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square miles, and sometimes several times that. The New York senator had raised valid questions.41 Ribicoff ’s call for a comprehensive, national school integration program came amid growing skepticism that integration was an achievable or even desirable goal and an advancing belief that community control of schools was the path toward Black educational progress. The Emergency Ad Hoc Committee of Parents for Community Control—­which included a number of members who had been at the forefront in the battle to integrate city schools—­averred (in 1968): We have not abandoned our struggle for integrated education, but we believe that community control can provide the preliminary base upon which both educational excellence and real integration are built. The current imbalance of power between the white and black communities must be redressed before we can pretend to claim that there is any justice or equality.42

This reasoning reflected fond hopes more than a sober assessment: in reality, a turn to community control in white urban neighborhoods as well as Black and Brown ones would entail a long-­term increase in school segregation. As many proponents had emphasized, community control was the standard for suburban communities. Because the primary source of school funding was—­and remains—­ local tax revenue, vast economic and racial disparities persist in the educational resources available to communities. Whereas financial stable municipalities with a single school system have complete authority to allocate funding for schools as they see fit, community-­controlled districts that are part of a larger school system, as in New York City, would depend on funding decisions made at the city level. The call for community control in many US cities led at least one senator, Ohio Republican Robert Taft, to question Ribicoff ’s school desegregation plan: “Would a community raise local tax dollars to support schools if its own students may be required to go into another school system for their education? How anomalous it is that [the Ribicoff] amendment would enlarge educational districts at the very time when the trend is the other way and neighborhoods such as Ocean Hill–­ Brownsville want to have more localized control over their schools.”43 Back to Integration The facsimile of community control endured a quick but painful death in New York City. The decentralization law passed by the state legislature in 1969 ended

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the community control experiment and devolved some authority from the central school board to thirty-­two local school boards, which were often captured by UFT slates. In retrospect, few would claim that decentralization had empowered low-­income communities to meaningfully rejuvenate their local schools. In 1980, as a member of the state Board of Regents, Kenneth Clark deemed the schools “no better and no worse than they were a decade ago. In terms of the basic objective, decentralization did not make a damn bit of difference.”44 By the early 1970s, Black families in New York were sadly accustomed to nearby whites perceiving them as contagious individuals to be avoided at all costs. The city’s plans to construct three twenty-­four-­story buildings of public housing in the middle-­class, mostly Jewish neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens, drew fevered protests from neighborhood residents. Jerry Birbach, president of the recently formed Forest Hills Residents’ Association, complained that the city was “transplanting a malignant tumor to a healthy, viable community.” The district where the proposed project was located had fewer than four hundred Black residents out of thirty-­eight thousand.45 Writing for the New York Times Magazine, the sociologist Nathan Glazer predicted that the influx of poor adolescents and young adults would shatter the neighborhood’s tranquility: “Many of them will extort money from children at school, beat them if they don’t provide any, break the windows of the neighborhood stores, rob from them, attack the elderly for money or sport. These are simple facts which the [very few] black and [numerous] white people of Forest Hills are quite aware of.” He cautioned against labeling the project opponents as racists “in their fight for a hard-­won security.”46 Glazer’s dire predictions would not be tested, as a young Mario Cuomo brokered a compromise plan that cut the height of the three buildings in half and reserved 40 percent of slots for senior citizens. Subsequently, the project became a co-­op, with residents required to purchase shares in it. (They could only sell their shares back to the city’s Public Housing Authority.) As illustrated by the Forest Hills case, administrative checkpoints could be erected in housing policy as well.47 The quest to secure educational justice for Black youth had resulted in decades of disappointment. Where Black families had been able to move to white neighborhoods in any substantial numbers, white families had booked moving trucks. When local schools had experienced rising Black student populations, many white families had enrolled their children in nonpublic schools or relocated. And when the Board of Ed had reassigned Black children from

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overcrowded neighborhood schools to underutilized white ones, white parents protested vehemently, sometimes violently. Black families in East Brooklyn must have felt particularly shunned by white New Yorkers. In 1959, the transfer of 360 Bedford-­Stuyvesant children to five virtually all-­white schools in the Glendale and Ridgewood neighborhoods in Queens a couple of miles away had provoked widespread outrage, school boycotts, and racist rhetoric that ranged from veiled to blatant. Board of Ed assurances that new schools built in the heart of Black Brooklyn would be integrated, as in the case of JHS 258, had proved worthless. A proposed educational park in East Brooklyn, drawing an integrated student body from a wide attendance zone, had been mothballed. An alternative to integration as a path to improved educational quality—­community control of schools—­had never been given a fair chance to succeed. At best, the Board of Ed and the UFT had been willing to give community residents some limited input in school matters but had remained adamant that authentic control, which would include community authority to hire and fire teachers and staff, would never occur on their watch. And so it was back to one of two long shots: transforming the education offered in poor, Black and Puerto Rican schools to the level of quality found in middle-­class neighborhoods or resuming the exhausting fight for integration against the wishes of a shrinking, resistant white population. The push for integration was not, most Black parents clarified, premised on the notion that sitting next to white schoolmates would magically cause Black student achievement to soar. The motivation was more pragmatic: from all appearances, most white elites, white politicians, and white city residents cared only about schools with substantial numbers of white students.48 If Black children were admitted to said schools, they would benefit from the more qualified teachers, greater resources, and more challenging curriculums offered there. Black parents were not naïve. They were keenly aware that having their children enter schools in white neighborhoods might expose them to hostility, low teacher expectations, and so on. The alternatives, however, seemed even less promising. Vagabonds from Brownsville The controversy over the school placement of a group of Black and Puerto Rican children living in a Brownsville, Brooklyn, public housing project painfully encapsulates the inept handling of school integration by officials at the local and

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state levels, the undeniably racist reactions of white residents, and the treatment of the children in question as unwelcome interlopers. The children were residents of the Tilden Houses, a complex of eight sixteen-­story brick buildings that had opened in 1961.49 Tilden Houses residents had already witnessed white flight in their buildings. In 1972, one resident recalled that around half the project’s tenants were white when she moved in with her family a decade ago; now, Tilden was virtually all Black and Puerto Rican. Schoolchildren were assigned to JHS 285 (Meyer Levin Junior High School) and five elementary schools in East Flatbush, part of District 18, which also included the Canarsie neighborhood. In 1969, the Tilden Houses were rezoned into the new District 23, but students continued to be assigned to the same District 18 schools. Then, in June 1972, the District 18 Community School Board voted to exclude all Tilden children, except those who had already been attending schools in the district, from enrolling in District 18 schools, citing residential racial turnover in East Flatbush. Some Black East Flatbush parents supported the decision, worried about resegregation. One Tilden parent, Dorothy Dolphin, rejected the charge that they were “forc[ing] our way into those schools. Actually they’re all we’ve ever known.”50 The following month, Deputy Chancellor Irving Anker informed the local school board that it must register all Tilden students. However, on the first day of the new school year (Monday, September 11), ninety Tilden students were denied registration at JHS 285, with a roughly 50 percent Black and Puerto Rican enrollment. The school was closed for two days after Tilden parents demonstrated outside the school. It reopened on Wednesday after the local board assigned the Tilden children to JHS 252, with a 95 percent Black enrollment. Their parents rejected the assignment. On September 22, Anker instructed the local board president to enroll the children at 285. The following Monday, September 25, JHS 285 was closed by the district superintendent to “avoid a very volatile situation.” By the end of the month, thirteen Tilden parents had been arrested at 285 on charges that included allegedly trying to block the entrance of students, trespassing, and interfering with school operations by trying to enroll their children.51 On September 26, the white-­controlled Parent Association of JHS 285 obtained a court order preventing the enrollment of the Tilden students. That order was reversed by a State Supreme Court justice the next day, and the Parents Association lawsuit was dismissed on October 10. On October 11, Schools

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Chancellor Harvey Scribner entered the dispute, assigning eleven Tilden students to JHS 285 (where their siblings attended) and thirty-­one to Canarsie’s JHS 211, which was 30 to 35 percent Black and Puerto Rican; he also ordered JHS 68, an overwhelmingly white Canarsie school, to make fifty seats available for Tilden Houses students preferring to attend there rather than 285 or 211. Scribner instructed the local board to devise a plan for integration at the three schools, due within three months. On October 13, a Friday, fifteen white parents at JHS 211 were arrested after attempting to prevent the registration of Tilden students. The following Monday, two dozen white parents locked themselves inside the school, preventing the entrance of teachers and students; an additional two hundred parents gathered outside in protest. Tilden children remained on the buses parked at the school. JHS 68 was closed for two days to block the registration of Tilden children. Two days later, Scribner secured a court injunction to end the sit-­in at 211. The chancellor changed course on October 23, ordering that the 31 Tilden students slated for enrollment at 211 should now be registered at JHS 68. In justifying his turnabout, Scribner said he felt “from the outset” that the Tilden students should be assigned to the virtually all-­white JHS 68. When considering this option initially, he decided against it because Tilden parents “said they feared sending their children to a ‘white stronghold,’” and JHS 211’s history of integration seemed to promise “a greater prospect of safety and hopefully a receptive welcome” for the students. After receiving confirmation from the president of the local school board that the children would be registered at JHS 68 and that the board would guarantee their safety, Scribner proceeded with his original intention. “Looking back,” he said, “I am willing to concede that if I erred, it was not in changing the order to [JHS] 68, but in not assigning the children there in the first instance despite the potential risk.” He avowed that he did not negotiate with the JHS 211 protestors, and that his decisions “were not the product of political or personal compromise.”52 Nevertheless, the indecisiveness of Scribner and other education officials in how to manage physical checkpoints created an enormous hardship for Tilden students. Kenneth Clark furiously accused Scribner of sacrificing the Tilden children “on the altars of white arrogance and ignorance.” In the early 1960s, Scribner, a bespectacled, balding, and sideburned New England native, had withstood white anger as he integrated the school system of suburban Teaneck, New Jersey, with

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mandatory busing. Before moving to New York City, Scribner had never in his five-­plus decades lived in a town with as many as fifty thousand residents. He had accepted the chancellor’s post two years before the District 18 controversy, an outsider hired to shake up the slumbering school system. Before his hiring, the chancellor’s seat had lain empty for fourteen months as the five-­member interim central school board (appointed by the borough presidents) searched for the next steward of the nation’s largest school system while they waited to be replaced by an elected board. The vacancy occurred at the inopportune time when decentralization was supposed to be taking root. While decentralization, which took effect in July 1970, was intended to devolve power from the central board to the thirty-­two community school districts, little change had been evident by the time Scribner came aboard in September.53 Scribner’s order only survived two days, as the Central Board of Education reversed the chancellor’s order and reassigned the children to 211 (per the chancellor’s October 11 order), specifying that the chancellor should continue his attempts to integrate JHS 68. (The 1969 decentralization law had blurred the distinction of powers between the central board, which traditionally set education policies, and the chancellor, who implemented them.54) Before news of the board’s reversal, the president of JHS 211’s parents’ association, Judy Koretz, offered a callous prediction of the reception Tilden Houses children could expect to receive if reassigned to the school: “These children will never be welcome here.”55 The board noted that the Tilden students, after having been prevented from attending school since the beginning of the school year, had been instructed to report to 211 on October 16. They were prevented from entering the school; subsequently they were assured that they would be able to begin classes on October 24. Late in the afternoon on October 23, Reverend Wilbert Miller, who served as the spokesperson for the Tilden parents, received word that the children would instead be attending JHS 68. Most of the parents did not learn of the shift until the following morning, when their children reported to JHS 211. Such an action, the board contended, violated board policy requiring that parents be consulted before such zoning changes were effected. Moreover, “this action was in violation of the simple human considerations that should attend these zoning procedures.” The board maintained that the addition of thirty-­one Tilden Houses pupils would not demonstrably change the racial mix in either school, both of which had large school populations: 1,900 at JHS 68 and 1,450 at JHS 211. The “token

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impact” on integration at these schools “must be balanced against the educational and psychological impact on these children by the treatment that they have been subjected to.” After their “traumatic rejection,” Tilden students should not “be used as a battering ram for the integration of J.H.S. 68.”56 Since the beginning of the school year, the Tilden youth had been led to believe they would attend JHS 285 (if they had siblings enrolled there). Then JHS 252. Then JHS 211. Then JHS 68. And now back to JHS 211. On Thursday, October 26, the central board pleaded: “All New Yorkers may be dismayed at seeing the specter of Little Rock, Arkansas, surface in our city. We were all appalled at the incident. As Americans we were ashamed before the world that the army of the United States had to be used to permit children to enter schools safely. It would be equally appalling and equally outrageous if the police of New York City” were required to effect the entrance of thirty-­two children into schools here.57 The next day, moving past a hostile, jeering crowd, between twenty-­nine and thirty-­two Tilden Houses students entered JHS 211, with very few classmates—­but one thousand white protestors. On October 29, State Education Commissioner Ewald Nyquist upheld the central board, noting that the board had a stated policy of promoting school integration and that the board and the chancellor had the authority to implement this policy. Nyquist rued “the grave injustice” visited upon the Tilden students, who “had been subjected to humiliation and had been rejected in ways which may blight their spirits and minds for a long time to come.” Mayor Lindsay, fearful of the political repercussions that might result from taking sides in the issue, stayed in the background.58 On October 30, in response to the entrance of the Tilden children, white Canarsie parents commenced a district-­wide boycott of their local schools; more than nine thousand children were absent from school. The chancellor personally led the Tilden students into JHS 211, making their way past a protesting crowd of around fifteen hundred. On Halloween, tensions ramped up, despite a smaller group of five hundred to six hundred whites protesting behind police barricades. Inside the school, the twenty-­nine Tilden students attended class with around two hundred local children.59 Over twelve hundred students were absent. Outside, as many as two hundred Black supporters of the Brownsville students stood behind separate barricades as the dueling protest groups exchanged angry invective. Officers in riot gear, monitored by a police helicopter, attempted to maintain order as white adults responded to a

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request to let the Black youths leave the area by yelling, “We don’t want them here,” and throwing eggs at their youthful purported enemies. Another white protestor screamed: “You ain’t people, you’re animals! Go back to the zoo.” Groups of Black and white youths, presumably older than junior high age, readied for a clash with sticks, canes, pipes, baseball bats, and, in at least one instance, a chain and a long-­handled razor. A physical clash never materialized—­ with an eighteen-­year-­old Al Sharpton helping to avert one confrontation between Black and white youths—­and later in the day an interracial group of six youths met to try to cool tensions. In the aftermath of the demonstrations, a store window was shattered, a school crossing guard suffered a blow to the head, and a Black teen had a bloodied head, which he said had been struck by a police officer’s club. One Brownsville father of four clarified: “We don’t want integration with these people. We want quality education. If my kids can’t make it on this level, what are they going to do when they reach my age?” Tears streamed down his face.60 The combined PTAs of Canarsie ended the boycott on Tuesday, November 7, vowing to resume the boycott if they found the forthcoming rezoning plan not to their liking. The local board announced its integration plan for the three junior high schools in December. If the rezoning plan were enacted as envisioned, the white population would decrease from 98 percent to 85 percent at JHS 68; it would increase from 66 to 70 percent at JHS 211; and it would increase from 42 to 52 percent at JHS 285. The plan included a stipulation that all Tilden Houses students would be phased out of District 18 by 1975. Despite Scribner’s rejection of the proposal, the local board officially submitted its plan on January 12, 1973. The local board warned that integration must be “carefully planned and gradually implemented”; “coercion would . . . cause neighborhood housing patterns to alter radically to the detriment of all our citizens.” Assigning Tilden students outside District 18 was crucial to the success of any integration plan, since keeping them in the district would inevitably result in “emotional excesses stemming from [such a plan’s] untenable disregard for the rights and logical feelings of those intimately involved,” the local board argued.61 Given that Tilden parents wished for their children to remain in District 18, the latter phrase evidently referred to the “rights” of white students and parents. Scribner again denied the phase-­out of Tilden youth but accepted other elements of the plan. While parents at 68 and 211 were riled by Scribner’s rejection

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of the Tilden phase-­out, East Flatbush parents—­including those at 285—­were incensed that no Canarsie children would be bused outside their neighborhood. The central board again struck down Scribner’s ruling on February 23, promising a final resolution before March 30. On March 1, the Italian American Civil Rights League and the Concerned Citizens of Canarsie, both of which were emerging as reactionary voices against increased integration in Canarsie, called for a district-­wide boycott of schools. The local board and Parents Association did not support the boycott. Nevertheless, within a week, 85 percent of elementary and junior high students in District 18 were not attending school. On March 30, the central board ruled that no new Tilden students would be admitted to District 18 schools beginning in the fall. While the District 18 proposal moved to phase out Tilden Houses youth from the junior high schools, the central board also phased out elementary students. The following day, Canarsie parents ended the boycott, with many declaring victory. Seymour Lachman, the board’s Brooklyn representative and its vice president, explained that in recent years, Tilden students were enrolled in five East Flatbush elementary schools that were becoming increasingly segregated, with an average Black and Puerto Rican enrollment of 75 percent. Future Tilden residents would be assigned to schools in District 20 (Bay Ridge–­Bensonhurst), 21 (Gravesend–­Coney Island), and 22 (Midwood–­Sheepshead Bay), with a combined white school population of 75 percent.62 Kenneth Clark and his colleagues at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC), which Clark founded and directed, were unequivocal in their verdict on the central board: its members “are, individually and collectively, irresponsible, capricious and incapable of performing adequately the important functions” assigned to them. Clark “declared war” on the board for capitulating to white racism and asked the borough presidents, who appointed members of the interim board, to remove all five members. “Reasonable citizens” could not “maintain any confidence” in the board members. MARC called on the state Board of Regents, on which Clark sat as the sole Black member, and the state Education Commission to replace the current board with a receiver or trustee until a new board could be appointed.63 Clark affirmed his readiness for confrontation, publicly calling for investigation of allegedly padded pay claims made by board members and the employment of some of their spouses in the school system. Lachman, who became board president in summer 1973, labeled the

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efforts of Clark and his MARC associate Lawrence Plotkin to remove the board as “pure McCarthyism,” calling the accusations “false and reprehensible.”64 In turn, those friendly to the board asked that Clark’s employment as a professor at the City College of New York, which he held along with his position at MARC, be investigated as well.65 If the extremely important conflicts over how—­or even if—­NYC would pursue greater integration of schools sometimes descended into recriminations over tangential issues, the perceived success of Canarsie whites in severely limiting school desegregation did appear to embolden other neighborhoods to fight integration moves. In October 1973, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins observed that Tilden Houses children transferred to District 22 continued to be targets of racial reaction: “White parents there protested also, sat in at the school and in every way possible made it clear that these children were as unwanted in District 22 as they had been in District 18.”66 Wilkins was referring to a ten-­day protest by parents at an elementary school in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, PS 251, opposing the admission of ten kindergarten and first-­grade children from the Tilden Houses. Some parents had booed the Brownsville children as they entered the school. The protest, which also involved around 200 of the 700 children attending there, had depressed attendance to around 250 or 300 per day. On the day the Tilden pupils entered the school under a court order, 148 students attended. Of those, 133 were Black—­nine of them were Tilden children, with the remainder comprising Black students who normally attended the school and were not the target of parental protest. Parents claimed that the admission of the Tilden students would upset the racial balance, which was 30 percent Black. The admission of the ten Brownsville students would increase the Black proportion of the student body by around 1 percent. The parents ended the ten-­day protest when they reached an agreement with the local school board that the children would be admitted—­as a federal court had already ordered. The agreement stipulated that admission of pupils from outside the district would be sharply limited and would require local school board approval. Siblings of the ten Tilden youth would be admitted to 251 only in the “event of hardship.”67 White resistance—­in this instance, to limit the enrollment of more Black students at an already integrated school—­had yielded dividends once again. By the early 1970s, the city had abandoned the community-­control experiment, and its limited integration efforts were often ham-­handed and sharply

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limited, with the shifting use of administrative checkpoints satisfying none of the involved parties. The frustration of many African American educational leaders with their inability to exert political power was palpable. In 1971, Kenneth Clark prepared to give the presidential address before the American Psychological Association. His election as APA president two years earlier had surprised and pleased him. Attendees who expected Clark to recount his long career fighting on behalf of racial justice were in for a surprise. After a quick review of his research career, Clark turned to his main topic: the utter destruction of humankind through the irresponsible and immoral misuse of power by the few men with the capability to wreak such havoc. The solution to this danger, Clark proposed, could be found in “a requirement imposed on all power-­controlling leaders—­and those who aspire to such leadership . . . to accept and use the earliest perfected form of psychotechnological, biochemical intervention which would assure their positive use of power and reduce or block the possibility of their using power destructively.” In Clark’s formulation, the agreement to accept such a vaccination would constitute “a type of internally imposed disarmament.”68 He suggested that the development of such morality drugs was not far off. Prior to delivering the address, Clark envisioned one dosage specifically for elected and military officials, and another for the general population. Clark anticipated “questioning, criticism, even name-­calling” in response to his proposal, and he was correct.69 One of Clark’s numerous critics, Harvard professor of social ethics Herbert Kelman, argued that abuses of power could not be eradicated by targeting individual minds “so long as institutional arrangements permit abuses of power.”70 Among the many questions that Clark’s proposal provoked was how society, which was foolish to trust in the unmedicated morality of political and military leaders, could have faith in those individuals with the power to develop and determine the use of such drugs. As Daniel Matlin astutely observes, “‘the dilemma of power’ had not been solved, but displaced.”71 Despite the vociferous criticism of his proposed check on power abuse, Clark did not drop the idea quickly. Using President Nixon’s Vietnam “truce”—­and calls in some quarters to nominate Nixon for the Nobel Peace Prize—­as an opportunity to reintroduce his idea, Clark penned an essay for Newsweek in March 1973 that reiterated his psychotechnological plan.72 Again, he gained no traction. What is striking here is not the failure of Clark’s plan, but the desperation that fueled his proposal in the first place.

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The UFT after Community Control The UFT had more practical concerns. The union had won the bruising battle over community control, but in doing so it had provoked substantial animosity in disadvantaged communities. In 1969, Albert Shanker spotted an opportunity that might heal some of the open wounds while simultaneously strengthening the union: organizing paraprofessionals. Starting in the mid-­1960s, New York City received federal funds to hire teachers’ aides in low-­income schools.73 Preston Wilcox chaired the Harlem-­based Women’s Talent Corps (WTC), which began training local women in community programs and local schools. After a letter-­ writing campaign and a sit-­in at the Board of Ed, seventy-­five WTC trainees were hired by the board to become paraprofessionals in 1967. By 1970, the board employed over ten thousand paras. Per federal regulations, all applicants to the para program had to be receiving welfare or eligible for it. Circa 1970, nearly 90 percent of paras were Black or “Spanish-­surnamed,” and 93 percent were women. Pay was very low.74 Shanker biographer Richard Kahlenberg describes the appeal of organizing paras, which would add to union membership numbers, “integrate the largely white union,” assure their support in future strike actions, and “put the lie to the myth that Shanker and the UFT did not care about blacks and Hispanics.”75 As Nick Juravich indicates, many paras crossed picket lines during the 1968 strikes, particularly in the three community-­control districts. Executing Shanker’s plan would not be easy. Many teachers did not want paras in their union, and many paras believed that Shanker and his union were racist. The other union vying to represent paraprofessionals, AFSCME, had a strong civil rights record, in contrast to the impression that the UFT stood in opposition to Black and Puerto Rican communities.76 The final vote on union representation for paras was tight, with the UFT slightly behind, and the remaining 300–­400 ballots left to be counted from Ocean Hill–­Brownsville paras who had been hired by unit administrator Rhody McCoy. Surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of OHB paras voted for the UFT. To increase the union’s negotiating leverage, Shanker called a strike authorization vote in April 1970. The four thousand paras approved the measure overwhelmingly, but the authorization still required the approval of the sixty thousand teachers in the union. On June 4, fresh off a fifteen-­day stint in jail (his second in three years)

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for violating the Taylor Law, which prescribed penalties for teacher strikes, the UFT leader announced that teachers had approved the strike authorization by a three-­to-­one margin. Negotiations over the summer yielded a para contract that included average salaries increasing from $2,000 to $4,600, and a career development provision that offered release time with pay for paras enrolling in high school equivalency courses or college courses at CUNY. Shanker later reflected that organizing paraprofessionals was “the greatest thing the union ever did.”77 New York City’s fiscal crisis hit paras hard, with nearly two-­thirds laid off before the 1975–­76 school year. In 1976, CUNY began charging tuition; the Board of Ed budget excised funding for paraprofessional training. Though nearly six thousand paras took courses at CUNY each semester from 1972 to 1976, few ultimately endured the six years it took to gain a teaching degree. By the time the career-­ladder program was ended in the early ’80s, only approximately two thousand paras had received their teaching degrees. Ultimately, the para initiative did little to increase representation of Black and Latino teachers in the school system.78 If welcoming paras into the UFT engendered some good will towards the union, its position on bilingual education did the opposite. In 1972, the newly formed Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) sued the Board of Education, accusing it of denying Puerto Rican students of limited English proficiency full participation in city schools. The 1974 consent decree signed by the board and the plaintiff Aspira, an education advocacy organization formed in 1961 to mobilize Puerto Rican youth politically, was limited in scope. As Sonia Song-­Ha Lee describes the agreement, “only Spanish-­speaking children who could not speak English would be offered bilingual education, and then only until they could phase out of Spanish usage.” During the first year of implementation, the 1975–­76 school year, a mere 17 percent (less than 52,000) of Spanish-­surnamed students received bilingual education. The city had hired only 728 Hispanic, bilingual teachers in this new program.79 The UFT had fought aggressively against the demands by Puerto Rican parents that Puerto Rican teachers be hired for the bilingual program, essentially arguing that such a step would betray the principles of colorblind meritocracy and that bilingual programs segregated Puerto Rican students. The UFT contended that the proposed separate hiring system for bilingual instruction would amount to “ethnic quotas,” despite the fact that the number of non-­Hispanic

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teachers capable of teaching bilingually was extremely low. As Jonna Perrillo writes: “Even in a case in which racial and ethnic identity undeniably qualified some teachers with a unique skill set, the union was unwilling to yield to the idea that professionalism and race could or should intersect.”80 The Fiscal Crisis and Federal Charges of Discrimination By the mid-­1970s, the issue of increasing integration and equity in the school system was overwhelmed by a more fundamental issue: maintaining the school system during a severe fiscal crisis. Kim Phillips-­Fein’s exhaustive research on the fiscal crisis details the excruciating costs to the school system: “The number of people employed by the Board of Education fell by almost 20 percent between 1975 and 1978. There were thousands fewer teachers by the end of 1976 than there had been a year earlier, not to mention fewer guidance counselors, assistant principals and other support staff. The result was larger classes at all grade levels, fewer classes in art and music, and a shorter school day” by ninety minutes.81 Extracurricular activities, athletic programs, summer school, and school safety measures were slashed. In June 1975, according to Phillips-­Fein, “the Board of Education held a citywide ‘day of mourning’ for the public school system. Flags at schools were lowered to half-­mast, students, parents, and teachers wore black armbands, and at 10:30 a.m. classrooms observed a five-­minute period of silence. Principals then led lines of students from their classrooms as though in a fire drill, to dramatize the emergency facing the school system.”82 As Jon Shelton recounts, “From late 1974 until the end of 1976 alone, the city lost 25 percent of its teachers, and class sizes reached fifty in some places, prompting student walkouts in the 1975–­76 school year. The cuts disproportionately hurt the city’s African American and Puerto Rican school districts.”83 While middle-­class parents viewed NYC public schools as “increasingly unattractive” and had the wherewithal to exit the system, poor parents in neighborhoods such as Harlem fought against school closings (with mixed success) and pressed the state to make school vouchers available for private-­school tuition or enable them to launch parent-­run schools. Activists who had battled for racial justice in the decades prior to the fiscal crisis, whether through integration or community control, now were “forced to defend [the] very existence” of public schools. In the midst of protesting school closures and funding cuts, “the questions about racial equality and local democracy that had animated Harlem’s schools [and

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those in other Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods] earlier in the century were unable to occupy the same space.”84 As New York City navigated the fiscal crisis, the city’s Commission on Human Rights and, more notably, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s (HEW) Office for Civil Rights began to investigate ongoing racial issues in the city school system. In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled for the first time against a de facto segregated school system—­that is, one where segregation had not been required by law. In Keyes v. School District No. 1 (413 U.S. 189), the justices found that while the city of Denver and the state of Colorado had not mandated school segregation by law, Denver school officials had taken intentional actions to segregate schools, such as redrawing school zones. James F. Ryan describes the court’s finding: “State and local governments can act through constitutions and statutes, but they can also act through more informal decisions and policies,” which also constitute state action. However, as Ryan elucidates, the court “did not place the North and South on precisely equal footing.” Because Southern states had segregated by law, “the only issue . . . after 1954 concerned the proper remedy.” Outside the South, plaintiffs had to prove that school officials had acted intentionally to segregate. In a number of cases, courts had to consider whether to “infer intent from circumstantial evidence,” resulting in “a less-­than-­uniform approach.”85 In addition to the case’s relevance to school systems outside the South, it also had implications for multiracial school systems such as existed in Denver and New York.86 What would qualify as integration or segregation in a system that was not binary Black/white would certainly be of interest to NYC school officials and families alike. Surely, education activists had not forgotten the Board of Ed’s claim that IS 201, with a Black and Puerto Rican student body, was integrated. In 1974, Schools Chancellor Irving Anker appeared before the city commission to discuss the state of school integration. In the two decades since its 1954 statement committing itself to student integration, the board had “vigorously and consistently pursued” that policy, he declared. However, given that two-­thirds of the city’s 1.1 million public school children were minority group members, with that proportion expected to rise in coming years, even a single educational complex serving the entire city would be ethnically imbalanced. Moreover, reduction of minority group isolation was slowed by factors beyond the board’s control, including segregated housing, an inflow of poor minorities, the exit of white and middle-­class families to the suburbs, and more white and middle-­class

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students in private schools. Indeed, he reported, 1972 data revealed that fewer than 10 percent of minority-­group children attended private schools, whereas nearly half (47.2 percent) of white children did.87 Anker pointed to a recent study by the National Opinion Research Center and Johns Hopkins University that praised New York City’s desegregation efforts: “New York City’s controversies over education have received a great deal of attention and obscured the fact that over the past ten years the city school system has done a reasonably good job of desegregating . . . at least it has done a great deal more than other large cities.” Anker offered several examples of him overriding local objections, including admitting minority students from other districts to predominantly white schools and integrating a school “with white students from a nearby district.” At the high school level, the city had periodically shifted zoning patterns to increase integration, had made more seats in predominantly white schools available to minority students, and had sited every school built in the last two decades “in a middle class or fringe area” to enhance integration, Anker said. Anker criticized suburban areas, which deserved more blame than cities, where most children would experience a degree of integration at some point. “If integration is the sine qua non of education, can we continue to ignore the blatant contradiction of one set of standards for the inner city and another for adjoining suburbs?”88 He was justified in criticizing the double standard that predominated between cities and suburbs. If suburban localities successfully excluded families who were not white or whose incomes were modest from living there, their segregated schools were off the hook. There were no Black or Brown students to segregate, so white residents in these towns could plead “racial innocence,” to use Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino’s term.89 As was the case with segregation in housing, comprehensive approaches to dismantling school segregation would need to be enacted at the metropolitan level. The wide majority of suburban whites did not view erasure of lines between cities and suburbs or between whites and “others” as being in their self-­interest. Indeed, a substantial portion of them had relocated to suburbs out of a desire to keep these lines firm, bold, and impenetrable. Two months after Anker’s testimony, the US Supreme Court reified city/suburban educational boundaries in Milliken v. Bradley.90 HEW’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was considerably less sanguine than Anker about New York City’s efforts. In 1975, OCR began legal proceedings to

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force five NYC school districts—­one of which was District 18—­to cooperate in an investigation of possible discrimination in city schools. The civil rights investigation of New York marked the first time that the federal government had taken such an action against a large Northern school system.91 The federal action was prompted by litigation brought by the NAACP charging that HEW was not enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to the New York City school system. A 1976 court order established deadlines for HEW to require a reply from the city.92 In July 1977, HEW announced that it would withhold $19.3 million in federal aid from the central board and eighteen community school districts—­including District 18—­that had been requested for initiatives to assist minority-­group students and students whose first language was not English.93 Two months later, the Board of Education announced an agreement with HEW, which had alleged that the city had discriminated in the hiring and promotion of minorities and women. The city agreed to assure that the number of minority teachers be proportionate to the number of minorities in the labor pool and that each school’s teaching staff would reflect the proportion of minority teachers in the entire system (give or take 5 percent) by September 1980. OCR’s criticisms of the New York City school system went well beyond the representation of minorities and women on staff. The agency’s compliance review of the system—­the most extensive civil rights investigation of a public educational institution ever launched by HEW—­found that the system was violating civil rights laws banning discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act); sex (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972); and the physically and mentally disabled (Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973). Among other findings, OCR concluded that the city’s public school system — ­subjected minorities to lower amounts of local resources, poorer quality facilities, less experienced and less qualified teachers and staff, overcrowded classrooms and more limited curricula; —­ segregated minorities in elementary school classrooms and special education classes; —­ barred students whose primary language was not English from participating meaningfully in educational programs;

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—­ channeled minority and female students in junior high and high schools into “less desirable and more restricted academic, vocational and special programs,” and provided them with inadequate counseling services; —­ disciplined minority junior high and high school students more severely than non-­minority students for the same offense; and —­ provided non-­ambulatory students with a shorter instructional day and denied them full participation due to architectural barriers.94

In a letter to Anker, OCR director Martin Gerry described the accusations in considerable detail, including the misuse of federal educational funding. Virtually all federal education programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (in Titles I and VII) directed resources toward students with economic or educational disadvantages, including non-­English language background. Racial and ethnic minorities were the primary beneficiaries of this funding; New York City received $160 million under these two programs for the 1975–­76 school year. OCR found that New York City used these federal funds for regular instructional programs rather than for supplementary programs as intended. Predominantly nonminority schools received the same services from local tax levies. In academic high schools, tax levies per pupil declined in direct proportion to the percentage of minority students enrolled in a school. Gerry charged, “This pattern is so pervasive that it is possible statistically to predict the predominant racial/ethnic characteristics of any academic high school within New York City by examining its instructional expenditures.”95 The conflict over HEW’s withholding of federal funds continued into 1978, largely centered around the equitable distribution of Black and white teachers in schools throughout the system, rather than concentrating Black teachers in primarily Black and Puerto Rican schools. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the most vocal critics of assigning teachers by race, comparing the selection process to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws.96 In contrast to other large cities that had negotiated with HEW on teacher assignment reforms, the New York agreement did not mandate forced transfers of teachers, due largely to the political influence of the UFT. In September 1980, the board was found to be in noncompliance with the stipulated faculty integration measures, but it insisted it was acting in good faith. Due to budgetary issues, planned hiring turned into substantial layoffs of teachers, and many applicants turned down

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teaching offers from the city, the board said. In November 1982, under the Reagan administration, teacher assignment requirements were diluted to the point of virtual meaninglessness. The protracted dispute between the board and HEW was remarkable in part for what it excluded: transfers of students for increased racial integration. During this period of anti-­busing fervor in the US, this was no accident.97 While organizations such as the NAACP continued to fight against segregation, a number of Black individuals who had long been involved in the quest for educational justice dismissed the push for integration. Leslie Campbell (later known as Jitu Weusi), a pivotal figure in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville during the community-­control era, had opened an Afrocentric private school, Uhuru Sasa Shule (Swahili for Freedom Now School), in Bed-­Stuy. (The school closed in 1984 due to financial difficulties, but by 1997 nearly eighty Black independent schools were operating in the city.) The Black drive for integration was “dead,” he said. “Most black folks feel, too, [that integration has] always been one-­way, it’s been black kids being brutalized, psychologically manipulated—­it’s never been white kids.” Babette Edwards, a long-­time school activist in Harlem who was intimately involved in the community control experiment there, opined that “ethnic diversity at this point is a luxury” that might be addressed down the road “after there is effective education.” If there had been any real desire to integrate the school system, “it would have been done a long time ago.”98 Edwards’s career of educational advocacy exemplifies the pragmatic strand that made activists open to new ideas: they just wanted something that worked. As Brittney Lewer recounts: “By the end of 1966, [Edwards] had marched overnight in single-­digit temperatures to demand integrated schools, had agitated for the proposed IS 201 to become a community-­controlled venture, and had been arrested” at the People’s Board of Education sit-­in (see chapter 5). She served for four years on the IS 201 Governing Board before resigning in 1971. By 1975, she had become an early proponent of school vouchers, which were first used in the South to help white children attend segregated, private schools. Early in the twenty-­first century, Edwards attempted unsuccessfully to open her own charter school in Harlem.99 While Edwards never went as far as Kenneth Clark’s “psychotechnological” plan, her history of educational activism shows a similarly deep and far-­reaching hunger to secure the education that Black students deserved and had long been denied.

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Postscript: White Resistance, Citizen Checkpoints, and Racial Transition in Canarsie By early 1977, the racial transition of the Canarsie and East Flatbush schools confirmed the fears of many integration critics. Clark and his MARC colleagues, among others, had argued that racial transition in East Flatbush schools was the result of the Canarsie-­dominated Community School Board 18’s longstanding policy—­with central board backing—­of letting East Flatbush schools become increasingly Black, rather than sending white Canarsie children to schools there. Canarsie parents had reacted with fury, and sometimes violence, to the notion that their children would be bused to schools with large Black populations. They would not tolerate a loosening of physical checkpoints that would result in their children attending “ghetto” schools. If critics argued that the board had not done enough, resistant whites made the opposite argument: that city and state school officials had engaged in excessive meddling that inevitably led to white flight and resegregated schools. JHS 285 in East Flatbush had seen its white school population shrink from 50 percent to 15 percent in five years. In Canarsie, JHS 211 (Wilson) was now 58 percent white, down from over two-­thirds white in 1972. And JHS 68 (Bildersee) was now 64 percent white; it had been virtually all white five years earlier.100 Jonathan Rieder’s classic ethnography of Canarsie, researched between 1975 and 1977, offers a penetrating portrait of Italian and Jewish residents resisting incursions of African Americans. Many residents there professed to have little problem with the prospect of Black middle-­class neighbors but feared that as whites deserted the neighborhood, lower-­income Black families would follow their more upwardly mobile brethren. One white Canarsian confessed that “we can’t tell the difference between a black pimp and a black mailman. When I look at a white man, I can tell what social class he is, but if he is colored, I can’t tell.” Consequently, all African Americans were presumed to be of suspect character.101 In the effort to keep neighborhood homes and schools white, Canarsians practiced their own makeshift brand of affirmative action, convincing some Russian Jewish families in Brighton Beach to bus their children to Canarsie schools or encouraging them to buy homes in the neighborhood. Canarsians’ support of this particular stripe of busing, after all their furious, supposedly principled resistance when it involved Black students, was deeply revealing. In

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Rieder’s telling, “the revolt against busing [for integration] was deferred white vengeance for the New York school crisis of 1968.” The memory rankled one Italian resident: “The blacks wanted decentralization at Ocean Hill–­Brownsville. They fired white teachers and put in black teachers. Now that might be a good idea, maybe blacks could teach black history better. But then 80 percent of the fired Ocean Hill–­Brownsville teachers came to Canarsie, and now the blacks want to come here! They want the white teachers back!”102 Some Canarsians contorted themselves to claim that their virulent racism did not make them bad people. One Jewish carpenter launched into self-­justification mode: “Those n—­—­s are the marauders of Brownsville. They ruined Brownsville, but I won’t let them ruin Canarsie. I’ll join a terror squad to keep them out. The liberals and the press look down on hardhats like me, but we’ve invested everything we have in this house and neighborhood. . . . I can be a good father and a nice guy and still say, ‘Fuck those n—­—­s.’”103 If it took local physical checkpoints, potentially reinforced by violence, to keep Black families out, so be it. A decade and a half later, the Washington Post provided an update on the Canarsie situation. The former white stronghold had come to resemble other integrated neighborhoods in the borough, with the minority population rising from 10 percent in 1980 to 25 percent a decade later. The transition was far from smooth. In a five-­week period beginning with the Fourth of July, 1991, the police had tallied fourteen bias crimes, including the fire-­bombing of a real estate office that was showing homes to minorities as a result of a court order, two slashings, a home defaced by a swastika, and a Pakistani-­owned grocery store burned to the ground. The grocery store burning, as well as two other incidents that summer, purportedly involved Black perpetrators, but most incidents were white attacks on African Americans, Hispanics, and immigrants. White homeowners and real estate agents received warnings of violence on the telephone if they sold homes to Black families. Many whites felt besieged. “They pushed us to the water. We can’t go any further. We’re at the ocean right now,” pleaded one.104 On August 10, flanked by four hundred police officers, Reverend Al Sharpton led a three-­hundred-­person march against racism through the Canarsie streets. Sharpton had been stabbed at a similar march in Bensonhurst seven months earlier, but this march concluded without violence or arrests. While many white Canarsie residents seemed merely curious about the march, the Times reported, several dozen whites walked along with the demonstrators, separated by police.

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Chants of “No justice, no peace” were met with shouts of “White power,” “Go back to Africa,” and “Sharpton, we’ll kill you.” The Saturday march was preceded by a Wednesday meeting between Mayor David Dinkins and forty local clergy members and other leaders, intended to allay community tensions. Dinkins had endured criticism earlier in his administration for not involving himself in a Black boycott of a Korean grocer in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Following the meeting, Dinkins opined that the city did have a problem with racism, but he did not view Canarsie as having a “special problem.”105 Ascending from the Depths? During this era, school segregation was low on the list of priorities confronting the city, despite the federal government’s demands that the Board of Ed address numerous areas of racial and sex discrimination. Crime, pollution, drug addiction, a brutalized economy, stunning property devastation in the Bronx, and a declining quality of life were more urgent issues on many agendas. For those with children in the public schools, however, quality of education still remained a core concern. Some felt integration remained at least a partial solution. Others felt it was precisely the problem. Some believed it was finally time for the Board of Education to come forth with a bold plan to reinvigorate city schools. The board did not inspire confidence in its intentions or capabilities, but with community control now off the table, where else was there to turn? The next chapter brings the New York school story up to the present. The fight for integration was not prominent for nearly forty years after the fiscal crisis of the mid-­1970s. Then, in the early 2010s, the issue returned to the forefront, fueled by a powerful student-­led movement demanding that the Department of Education (DOE) integrate student bodies to the extent possible, rectify resource disparities between schools, stop the criminalization of students, and work to hire staff that more closely reflected the experiences and cultures of the students they served. As the final two chapters will reveal, there is reason to believe that the current wave of integration activism will fuel meaningful changes to the New York City school system.

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The Renewed Demand for Integration

grassroots activism for school integration ebbed by the mid-­ 1970s. Numerous large cities experienced continued white exodus, making integration within city limits more difficult. The 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision forestalled most possible arrangements for inter-­district integration between urban and suburban school systems. Black parents and educational activists wanted Black children to attend schools that were robustly resourced, with reasonable class sizes and passionate, experienced teachers. A sizable number still believed that “integrated schools were the best, if not necessarily the most feasible, option” to achieve these aims.1 However, many had grown weary of trying to convince unbudging politicians and white Americans to embrace integration and looked to other alternatives. From the mid-­1970s to the early 2010s, the fight for school integration in New York City was essentially moribund. Nevertheless, a remnant of the integrationist dream had remained with the long-­delayed launch of an educational park in the Bronx. The theory was that enormous educational complexes would increase racial and socioeconomic integration via more expansive school zones and offer cutting-­edge facilities and technology, a long menu of course options, and robust support for students by psychologists, social workers, and other professionals. The North East Bronx Educational Park, the city’s first, began its delayed two-­ year rollout in September 1971 with the opening of PS 153. Plans for this park had been incubating since August 1966, when Superintendent Bernard Donovan and members of the Board of Education had approved construction on a site once occupied by the Freedomland Recreational Park.2 With the onset of a recession in 1969, the city’s fiscal health began to waver. Job losses jeopardized income and sales tax revenues and provoked greater need for city services. Delinquencies on property taxes also began to increase, with landlords abandoning buildings, NATIONW ID E ,

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in some cases arranging destruction by fire. Less funding flowed from national and state coffers.3 Delays in educational park construction ensued and many questioned whether the city could afford to bankroll this bold educational vision. To at least one city education official—­Frederick Shaw, who in 1969 was the acting director for the Bureau of Educational Research and Statistics at the Board of Education—­the educational complex in Co-­Op City “appears to offer the ideal setting for an educational experiment of this kind.” Co-­Op City was to become the largest apartment development in the world, a cooperative (as the name suggests) developed by the United Housing Federation (UHF), a consortium of labor unions. The 15,500-­unit “skyscraper in the park” complex would house working-­and middle-­class families affordably. The UHF proudly announced that units would be available without regard to “race, creed or color.”4 When the North East Bronx Educational Park finally opened its doors in fall 1971, the New York Times hinted that it was something of a relic on its first day, “the result of an idea that was advanced during the nineteen-­sixties, when the city was torn by a bitter controversy over school segregation and ways of achieving better racial balance.”5 One additional elementary school and two intermediate schools were slated to open the following year, with Harry S. Truman High School scheduled to welcome students in fall 1973. (A third planned elementary school to the southeast of Co-­op City was not located on the park site but was to be considered part of the educational component of the complex.) The director of the educational park estimated that the student body would be 30 to 40 percent Black and Puerto Rican once all schools were operating. In addition to the five schools, the park plans included two swimming pools, gymnasiums, a 1,200-­seat auditorium, a smaller 400-­seat theater with a planetarium, and athletic fields.6 Harry S. Truman High School opened its doors on September 10, 1973. A New York Times story on the first day of the school year remarked that the overall school population in the city had declined by 28,300 students from two years prior, while the number of security guards in the city’s public schools had tripled from 1972, to 1,700.7 By fall 1977, the idea that the school represented the cutting edge of education had become a joke. A voice piped through Truman High’s intercom welcomed students “to one of the best high schools in New York City.” Students in one classroom observed by a reporter responded with “jeers and hoots.”8 The $76 million educational complex was revealed to have serious construction flaws, which resulted in “water leakage” and “breakdowns in the

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heating, ventilation and air-­conditioning systems.” Indeed, such problems had been apparent since the first building opened in 1971, even provoking a one-­day boycott in 1975 that resulted in a loss of $17,000 in state funding. Water leakage at Truman and IS 180 damaged ceilings, walls, and floors: “One classroom in the intermediate school is so warm and dank that it has been converted into a greenhouse. The wooden floors in the high school’s gymnasium are buckled and walls in both schools are cracked. Waste baskets are used in hallways and classrooms to catch dripping water. In some rooms, electrical wiring hangs loosely from the ceiling.”9 Truman’s issues reflected system-­wide strain. The city’s fiscal crisis in 1975 and 1976 had resulted in the first layoffs of teachers in New York City’s history. Enrollments continued to decline, and the teaching staff of 51,500 remained substantially below pre-­crisis levels of 65,000.10 By the beginning of 1975, clear signals were emanating from the Board of Ed that massive educational parks were not the wave of the future, but another experiment ripe for abandonment. August Gold, director of educational facilities planning for the board, laid out the roadblocks facing the development of large sites for school complexes. As planners searched for viable parcels of land, in absence of better options, “they selected locations spanning railroad yards and highways, in wet lowlands, and even in the water.” When these sites were not available, “they fell back on tracts which had to be cleared of residential and commercial tenants by legal action.” Adaptation to site deviations and the extensive time required to wind a project through myriad bureaucratic mazes devoured much of the expected savings from the economies of scale that educational complexes had promised.11 New Yorkers who had lived through Robert Moses’s long reign as the “master builder”—­particularly those directly affected by the wholesale devastation of vibrant neighborhoods to make way for his notion of progress—­must have regarded these machinations with little enthusiasm. The logistics of scale compounded the headaches. Getting so many students and staff around a building and providing them services (such as food, sanitation, and supplies) was no small feat. Human relations also suffered, Gold said, as greater numbers of students and increased ethnic difference caused conflict to rise: “In an environment of so many, there will always be vast numbers of faceless ‘others’ to suspect, fear, and battle.” He had a point. Community battles over the construction of small schools—­as opposed to sprawling complexes that could bring upwards of four thousand students on a daily basis—­drew much less heat.

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With supersized schools, neighborhood “concerns run the gamut from noise to trampled lawns to pilferage in stores to mugging.”12 Even if educational park supporters had been able to allay these concerns, New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s crushed any remaining possibility for “going big” in education. Gargantuan cities needed bold, long-­term visions for the future, but the perpetual changes experienced in these cities carried the risk that the proposed solutions to problems would be outmoded by the time the vision had come to fruition.13 On the other hand, small-­scale approaches had proven woefully inadequate. After the halting launch of educational parks did not solve the issue of school segregation, integration essentially vanished from the educational agenda in New York City before re-­emerging in the early 2010s. Even the most optimistic and fervent believers in integration found little reason to hold out hope for a citywide commitment to this goal. The desire for greater community input in school operations and the immediate threats of school closures and drastic budget cuts in the mid-­1970s relegated integration to an afterthought. The Interregnum In her history of the New York City school system from the community-­control era to the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002–­13), Heather Lewis writes: “By the 1970s, school reform, which had galvanized New York City’s poor parents and community activists in the 1960s, receded as a solution to urban inequality. And nationally, policy pundits declared that expanding educational opportunities for poor children of color was no longer an effective lever to reduce lingering poverty.”14 The mayoral tenures of Abraham Beame (1974–­77), Edward Koch (1978–­89), David Dinkins (1990–­93), and Rudy Giuliani (1994–­2001) included little serious discussion of school integration. Intense racial conflicts emerged with startling regularity during the 1980s and ’90s; Koch and Giuliani had particularly strained relationships with New York’s Black community.15 Unlike his predecessors since the mid-­1970s, Bloomberg came into office with the goal of reshaping the public school system. In his first year, Bloomberg convinced the state legislature to dismantle community school boards, weaken and rename the central Board of Ed, and install mayoral control over the school system. His team fired hundreds of administrators and destroyed the records of local district activities. Meanwhile, the US Congress had passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which tied the evaluation of school success to standardized test

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scores but offered little in the way of resources to improve struggling schools.16 Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, sought to afford greater autonomy to schools with strong performance records. They also opened fifty charter schools and accorded them substantial resources, sometimes co-­locating them with traditional public schools in the same building.17 The 2002 law gave sole authority to the mayor in naming the chancellor, who reported directly to him. Previously, the central board had appointed the chancellor. Replacing the central board was an education panel that included eight mayoral appointees (including the chancellor) and five members appointed by the borough presidents, as well as two students who did not have voting privileges. Because the mayor and borough presidents could remove their appointees at will, the panel had little autonomy. Klein, Clara Hemphill writes, viewed “parents as consumers, entitled to a better level of customer service than previous administrations have offered but not in a position to make decisions about the delivery of these services, matters that are better left to professionals.”18 Bloomberg was a strong supporter of school choice, offering more students the opportunity to attend charter schools and erasing attendance zones in three of the city’s thirty-­two school districts. (Brownsville was one of the three.) By 2016–­17 in New York City, only 40 percent of kindergarten students attended their zoned school, defying “the conventional wisdom . . . that most elementary school children in New York City attend their zoned neighborhood schools and that the city’s high levels of school segregation merely reflected segregated housing patterns.” In fact, a 2018 study by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School found that city schools “would be marginally less segregated than they are now” if all elementary students attended their zoned school.19 At the high school level, Bloomberg launched the complex high school choice system, expanded the number of selective, screened schools, and opened a number of small schools that, like charters, often shared buildings with traditional public schools.20 Klein later recalled visiting two co-­located schools located on the Upper East Side–­East Harlem border. One was a Gifted and Talented (G&T) school that served a virtually all-­white and Asian population; the other was a “regular” school serving mainly Black and Latino children. While startled by the racial separation, Klein concluded that merging the schools would “be too much to ask” of the G&T parents and that he did not wish to “destabilize those [schools] that are doing well.”21 In

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2005, Zipporiah Mills became the first Black principal of PS 261 in Boerum Hill and was one of the first principals of color in Brooklyn’s District 15. She remarked that on a number of occasions during her eleven-­year tenure as principal, the notably diverse and inclusive school was invited to create a G&T program: I philosophically did not believe in it because I could see what would happen in our school. And I knew that all the other classes would be mostly Black and Brown and that class would be mostly white. So I said no to that. Then people were talking about the bilingual programs, but they were offering bilingual programs that were French mostly. I already know who was going to mostly be in these classes as well [middle-­class white children]. [This proposal was] another way of slipping around true diversity.22

Well-­connected and well-­resourced parents may have a number of viable schooling options for their children, including gifted and bilingual programs. However, in highly screened school systems such as New York City’s, it is often the schools, rather than the families, that do the choosing.23 Mayor de Blasio and the Re-­emergence of Integration on the Agenda Currently in New York City, parents of fifth-­and eighth-­grade students confront a dizzying array of educational possibilities as they navigate the junior high and high school admissions processes. For example, the 2019 NYC High School Directory stretches 630 pages, listing over seven hundred programs at more than four hundred high schools, in addition to the eight specialized high schools, where admittance is based on a single standardized test (the Specialized High School Aptitude Test [SHSAT]), and an audition school for the performing arts. Traditional public high schools utilize an array of admissions procedures. Screened schools, which are typically the most competitive after the specialized schools, rank students based on grades, test scores, attendance, and, in some cases, interviews and school-­specific tests. Educational Option schools admit half their students through screening and the other half through random selection, while Open schools admit all students by lottery. Some schools prioritize students residing in the school zone, though most do not. (The most sought-­after zoned high schools are mainly located in predominantly white and Asian neighborhoods.) There are also schools that screen for non-­English language ability and

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ones that enroll students who have dropped out or are behind in their credits.24 The process is similar to medical residency matching: schools rank students, students rank schools (up to twelve), and an algorithm matches a student to a school. For students with geographic constraints or unremarkable measurables (grades, standardized test scores, and so on), the possibility of admission to a high-­quality, well-­resourced school can dwindle rapidly. In 2017, the New York Times found that high school graduation rates tracked closely with admissions criteria. While 97 percent of students at specialized high schools and 86 percent of students at screened high schools graduated, only 60 percent in Educational Option schools did. The average Black or Hispanic student attends a high school that is 44 percent Hispanic and 35 percent Black. School choice is supposed to untie the connection between a student’s zip code and the quality of their education, since students can seek a better option if nearby schools are unappealing. “In practice,” however, “children who grow up in neighborhoods with low-­performing elementary schools tend to go to low-­ performing middle schools, then on to high schools with low graduation rates and even lower college-­readiness rates,” the Times report notes. The Center for New York City Affairs found that forty-­five middle schools out of over five hundred accounted for half the students who achieved high scores on standardized state tests and 60 percent of students who attended specialized high schools. Over half of city elementary schools are at least 80 percent Black and Hispanic, as are over 60 percent of middle schools, according to the Times. A full two-­thirds of public high schools in NYC are at least 80 percent Black and Hispanic.25 This segregation at the higher levels stems largely from meritocratic checkpoints beneath the softening overlay of school choice. The 2014 Civil Rights Project (CRP) report, which showed that New York State had a higher degree of school segregation than any other state, also found that “across the 32 Community School Districts (CSDs) in New York City, 19 had 10 percent or less white students in 2010, which included all districts in the Bronx, two-­thirds of the districts in Brooklyn (central to north districts), half of the districts in Manhattan (northern districts), and only two-­fifths of the districts in Queens (southeast districts).”26 Charter schools were substantially more likely to be “apartheid schools”—­73 percent had less than 1 percent white enrollment—­than traditional public schools, though they accounted for only 4 percent of public school students.27

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High school demographics had changed substantially over the prior two decades, with the white percentage in traditional public high schools virtually halved from 26.5 percent to 13.8 percent, the Black percentage declining from 44.6 to 29.6 percent, the Asian percentage climbing from 9.5 to 16.9 percent, and the Latino population more than doubling, from 19.3 to 39.3 percent.28 Nyah Berg, the Integrated Schools project director at New York Appleseed, which advocates for integrated schools and communities, agreed with others whom I interviewed about school integration politics that the 2012 Times reporting on school segregation in the city and the Civil Rights Project’s findings on statewide school segregation sparked greater attention to the issue of racial isolation: “Getting that infamous title [of being highly segregated], I think people in New York City, at least some didn’t like it much, and it kind of kick-­started some smaller efforts” to address school segregation.29 The Civil Rights Project report was released three months into Bill de Blasio’s first term as mayor, after his successful campaign vowing to unite the “two New Yorks” riven by economic inequality.30 When asked for his response to the report on segregation in NYC schools, de Blasio pointed to school segregation’s deep roots in centuries of racial inequality and “structural racism”; argued that, in improving all city schools, integration would increase; and said he would support local communities that wished to desegregate their schools. He added that residential segregation in numerous communities of the city made integration very difficult. He was not willing to pursue reassignment of students to increase integration and explicitly rejected school busing as an integration strategy for New York City.31 Halting Steps toward Increased Integration In fall 2012, the Community Education Council in Brooklyn’s District 15 had approved a rezoning proposal by the Department of Education (under Mayor Bloomberg) to reduce the attendance boundaries for two overcrowded schools in the largely affluent Park Slope neighborhood and build a new school to accommodate some of the students who were no longer zoned for the two existing schools. For a period of time, the new District 15 school was sharing a building with a mostly Black, three-­hundred-­seat school in neighboring District 13. City Council member Brad Lander, who represents portions of both districts and has become a political leader on integration in the city, remarked: “That sounded

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sensible, except what they were really saying was, ‘We’re gonna build a building with two doors; into one door will go 300 black kids, and to the other door will go 600 mostly white kids.” According to Lander, people in the district were startled by this stark segregation and vowed to change it. Local politicians, parents, and advocates were able to secure DOE agreement to create one nine-­hundred-­seat school for students from both districts, despite considerable resistance from the Bloomberg administration. That school, PS 133, became the first school to implement enrollment set-­asides to enhance socioeconomic (and thus racial) diversity.32 District 15 was better positioned to integrate than many other districts, with a student population that is currently 14 percent Black, 36 percent Latino, 16 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 29 percent white.33 Nearby schools with vastly divergent racial and socioeconomic profiles have not disappeared. Since the 1960s, two elementary schools on the Upper West Side (District 3), sitting a half mile from one another, have served starkly different populations. On West 70th Street, PS 199 enrolls students from the six-­building Lincoln Towers condominium complex. Only 14 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-­price lunch (FRPL). In 2018–­19, the student population was 63 percent white, 16 percent Asian, 9 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent Black. According to InsideSchools, a popular unofficial guide to New York City schools, “The school boasts big, bright classrooms, a gym with soaring windows, a music room, a wheelchair-­accessible playground, two art rooms and a well-­equipped library. . . . The PTA, which raises more than $800,000 a year, pays for teaching assistants in the lower grades.” PS/IS 191, on West 61st Street, draws students from an adjacent area that incorporates a large public housing complex, the Amsterdam Houses. Over two-­ thirds of students qualify for FRPL. In 2018–­19, the student population was 17 percent white, 7 percent Asian, 43 percent Hispanic, and 30 percent Black.34 InsideSchools provides no information on the school facilities or PTA fundraising. “In my lifetime at some point in time, somebody drew a circle around Amsterdam Houses and said all of the kids who are living in a high-­poverty neighborhood are going to go to one school and one school only. That’s segregation,” District 3 Community Education Council member Daniel Katz observed in 2017. “It was deliberate, it was unjust.”35 Although meritocratic checkpoints fuel current segregation, physical checkpoints also continue to enforce racial and economic separation in some locations.

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In November 2014, the City Council held its first public hearing on school desegregation in recent memory. The following June, the council passed the School Diversity Accountability Act, which de Blasio signed into law. That legislative package required the DOE to provide yearly demographic data to assess segregation and diversity and report on the steps it was taking to confront those issues. Though the council cannot require the DOE to adopt specific policies, it requested that the department develop a plan to reduce school segregation. During this period, momentum escalated among activists, parents, and educators in four school districts to develop school and district integration plans.36 In 2015, the DOE stuck its toe into the water of inclusive admissions programs like that at PS 133, naming seven schools that would establish targets to admit a certain percentage of students who were low income. In the context of the 1,700 schools under DOE purview, the program was “pretty modest,” council member Lander acknowledged. It represented “the first official step of them doing anything” but fell short of “a serious effort to confront segregation across the school system,” he said.37 When asked by the Gotham Gazette why the city’s integration effort was not more forceful, Mayor de Blasio cautioned that “you have also to respect families who have made . . . massive life decisions and investments because of which school their kid would go to.”38 In some sense, de Blasio was expressing an updated version of the segregationist taxpayers’ rights defense: those who pay more taxes should have more say in public policy. How far de Blasio would push for integration, if at all, remained in question in 2016. The mayor typically extolled the value of “diversification” of schools while pointing to the limits of school integration plans in the face of long-­standing problems such as housing segregation and structural racism.39 Meanwhile, Manhattan’s District 1 proposed a “controlled-­choice” integration plan that would balance parental choice with efforts to establish similar socioeconomic profiles for schools there. It is a comma-­shaped district on the Lower East Side that runs from the Bowery to the East River and has its northernmost boundary at East 14th Street. The compactness of the district, as well as its demographic profile, made it more suitable than many districts to establish a viable economic integration plan where schools there would resemble citywide demographics in the school system.40 In plans such as this one, race is not considered directly; enhancing socioeconomic diversity can, however, bring about increased racial diversity. In a 2006

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decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. (551 U.S. 701), a US Supreme Court majority “struck down individual racial assignment provisions in two voluntary school integration plans.”41 In a separate majority decision, the court stated: “A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue. Likewise, a district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population.”42 Virtually ignoring the second decision, the Bush administration issued guidance that discouraged race-­conscious school integration initiatives. In 2011, the Obama administration published guidance backing racial diversity measures that did not consider the race of individual students; it included examples such as strategic school siting, alteration of attendance zones, lotteries weighted by residential location, socioeconomic integration efforts, and inter-­district transfer plans. The guidance affirmed that the “race of individual students can still be taken into account to achieve diversity where ‘race-­neutral and generalized race-­based approaches would be unworkable.’”43 The Trump administration rescinded this guidance and redirected $12 million in federal funds that had been allocated for school districts and individual schools (including charters) to develop integration plans.44 Resurgent Student Activism The release of the 2014 UCLA report prompted Bronx teacher Sarah Medina Camiscoli to create IntegrateNYC (INYC) with her students. Camiscoli’s initial interest in an integration and equity agenda came from her work as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher. One student, Erick, asked her daily: “Why am I in ESL if I speak English?” Pursuing this question in a thesis, Camiscoli “discovered that schools had misplaced fluent English speakers in ESL and left them unprepared to pass the exit exam. The longer a student remained in ESL, the less likely they were to graduate.”45 According to Sarah “Zaps” Zapiler, the adult executive director of INYC, Camiscoli and her students identified the connections between attending segregated schools and being placed into ESL classes: “Segregated schools and discrimination based on identity and language were part of what was creating Erick’s reality.”46 With this realization, along with their frustration at the lack of resources available in their school and the release of the UCLA report, Camiscoli’s students decided to seek meetings with students at other NYC high schools. “Those exchanges,” Zaps said, “were about bringing

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youth with different experiences together to say, ‘OK, from where I sit what does segregation look like?’” and then creating a “holistic picture of how segregation is operating today.”47 INYC’s Julisa Perez Gomez took part in one of the first high school student exchanges, in which students from one school would shadow students at another. At the time, Gomez was a student at Leon Goldstein High School for the Sciences. InsideSchools offers the following description: Situated on the spacious but remote campus of Kingsborough Community College, Leon Goldstein High School for the Sciences boasts waterside views, a relaxed atmosphere and top-­notch academics. The contemporary building has computer and science labs, a ceramics studio with a working kiln, a library and media room, and a cafeteria with a wall of windows. It is connected to Kingsborough’s full-­size gymnasium and a beautiful swimming pool. Goldstein attracts some of Brooklyn’s best and brightest students, who want a school that’s smaller than popular giants like Brooklyn Tech. It’s the kind of place where a student carries around a novel that she is reading for fun, not for English class. Teens are treated respectfully, much like the college students they are soon to become.

In 2018–­19, Goldstein’s student population was 54 percent white, 29 percent Asian, 9 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent Black.48 (The racial makeup is partially attributable to the school’s location, which is difficult to access via public transportation.) The school exchange caused Gomez to realize that Goldstein left a void in her experiences. She praised the “abundance of resources within the school,” but said, “I lacked support in the relationships aspect of it. I couldn’t really put my finger on it when I was going through it, but when I experienced this school exchange, it was really clear to all of us. . . . We shouldn’t have to give up relationships to have current textbooks, and I shouldn’t have to give away resources to be able to connect with my teachers in a powerful way and really feel at one with my community.”49 Teens Take Charge (TTC) was co-­founded in 2017 by close friends Nelson Luna and Whitney Stephenson, who attended Democracy Prep in Harlem. Taylor McGraw was launching a podcast, Miseducation, “with the goal of amplifying students’ voices on education in the city.” Stephenson was McGraw’s first interviewee.50 In a series of conversations with McGraw, Luna and Stephenson

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began to think more deeply about segregation in New York City. Luna recalled a startling realization: “We live in New York City. Why the hell don’t I know any kids [my age] who are white?” Stephenson was similarly awakened when she reflected that “the only white people I know are my teachers. That’s a big issue. I realized I normalized so much.”51 Eventually, McGraw connected Luna and Stephenson to a group of students he was working with in SEO (Sponsors for Educational Opportunity), a mentoring and college preparatory program for underserved students.52 On April 17, 2017, at the Bronx Library Center, around a dozen students performed an evening of poetry, open letters, spoken word, and rap music about their experiences as students in city schools. Subsequent events were held at the Schomburg Center in Harlem and the Brooklyn Public Library. One student, Hebh Jamal, recalled her feelings of alienation at the prestigious Beacon High School in Manhattan, both because she is Muslim and was the only student from her middle school enrolled at Beacon. (Some middle schools send substantial numbers of students to Beacon.) “I didn’t realize why I felt the way I did until two years later when I visited an integrated classroom at another school. The feeling of inclusivity felt almost abnormal to me.”53 Another student, Haby Sando, wrote movingly about her experiences at a high school “in the middle of a war zone in Spanish Harlem”: My reality is a teacher who spent class periods discussing how much he would have to pay for child support and custody battles with the mother of his child rather than teaching 9th-­grade students about the wonders of human organisms. . . . My reality is an AP teacher who tells her students who don’t feel prepared enough to take the AP exam that their only job is to not disturb those who are. My reality is a teacher telling me that I plagiarized a paper due to the sophistication of my writing.54

Eighth-­grade students who are not admitted to prestigious public high schools may begin to doubt their academic capabilities. TTC’s Jorge Morales, who now attends the University of Rochester, recalled that he “fell in love with” the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized school that admits students based solely on a single test score: “It had a planetarium; they had origami clubs and things of that sort. It’s things that I’d never seen in my life.” Only finding out about the SHSAT a month before the exam was given, Jorge “did horribly.” No one in his school was admitted to a specialized high school, and “we kind of just

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blamed ourselves. We were like, ‘Oh, we’re probably not good enough. We’re not smart enough.’” However, he reflected, when “you begin to learn more about the system” and how some students take SHSAT preparation starting in the sixth or seventh grade, “you begin to wonder, ‘Was it really us?’”55 Stephanie Pacheco, who was raised in a “very, very, very low-­income neighborhood in the Bronx,” recounted that she and her middle school friends worked “super hard” to prepare for the SHSAT, beginning in the summer before her eighth-­grade year. “Literally zero of us got into a specialized high school . . . and we all blamed ourselves. We were all like, ‘Are we just not as smart as the white and Asian kids that get accepted into these schools? What are we doing wrong?’” Notably, Stephanie enrolled in a well-­regarded screened high school, located near the East River in East Harlem. Four of five students qualify for free or reduced-­priced lunch, above the city average. Over half the students are Hispanic, while Asian and Black students each represent about a fifth of students. One in twenty students is white. A rumor that the Department of Education was considering unscreening the school led to a vehement protest on school grounds. She described the scene: “The entire school was going to come out on the steps of my school building and protest the unscreening of my school. All the teachers were for it, all the staff were for [the demonstration], every single student, basically. . . . They’re going to protest literally in the middle of the school day to keep the screens.”56 Morales said it is “understandable” that parents and students benefiting from screening cling tightly to it: “That’s what the system is telling you to do. . . . [In] order for you to have a good life in the future, you need to make sure that you do the best and that you do all of this. And it’s truly exhausting.”57 High school applicants realize the stakes are high. As TTC member Lennox Thomas observed, admissions policies establish which students “enter a free academic heaven where opportunities [are] endless, funding [is] abundant, and the number of classes [are] in the hundreds, or an academic abyss, where there [are] finite resources, rushed curricula, and short staffing.”58 The School Diversity Advisory Group One response to vigorous student activism for integration was de Blasio’s launch of the mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), which met for the first time on December 11, 2017, shortly after his reelection. The thirty-­eight

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members of the full commission include five students (four high school and one college) and several public school teachers and school administrators, as well as representatives from advocacy groups, the DOE, and charter schools.59 Eleven days after the initial SDAG meeting, Carmen Farina, who had endured criticism for not fostering integration, stepped down as chancellor. Di Blasio announced Farina’s successor, Richard Carranza, in March 2018. The former superintendent of the Houston school system made it clear that integration would be one of his top priorities.60 In September 2018 remarks before the Association for a Better New York, Carranza insisted: Integrating schools is about expanding opportunity, not shrinking it. It doesn’t lower academic achievement for anybody, it improves it for all. The research is clear—­integration is good for every single child. We need to confront this problem head on. . . . We are taking a hard look at some of our enrollment practices from 3–­K through twelfth grade—­why do we have the systems that we do, and are they in the best interest of our kids? Are they in the best interest of our City—­of its future economic viability that rests on our public schools? The work of integrating schools and adding more opportunity across all of our schools—­with AP courses and 3–­K programs and literacy coaches—­go together. We must have high-­quality schools in every neighborhood, and learning experiences that students and families are excited about.61   

In February 2019, SDAG released the first of two sets of recommendations, after the group and its subcommittees had held more than forty meetings, in addition to town hall meetings with over eight hundred New Yorkers. The first set focused on public elementary and middle schools. Notably, the commission adopted IntegrateNYC’s framework, the “5 Rs of Real Integration”: Race and Enrollment, Resources, Relationships, Restorative Justice, and Representation. INYC’s Race and Enrollment plank alleges that “NYC public schools currently isolate many students of color, rely on racist and classist admissions policies, and have perpetuated school segregation and white supremacy due to a complex, inefficient and hyper-­competitive high school admissions process.” INYC demands “a holistic high school application process that confronts segregation and prioritizes integration through our refined, student-­designed algorithm that focuses on demographics of diversity including, but not limited to free and

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reduced price lunch, mother’s education level, [English-­Language Learner] status, incarcerated parent status, and geographical location.” The other Rs address the issues of equitable resources for high school programs (which continue to vary substantially in areas such as class size, support for English-­language learners and students with Individualized Educational Programs, access to sports teams, and Advanced Placement courses); “building relationships across identities,” which implores that “all NYC public high schools be considerate and empathetic of the identities of all students, focus on the power of different backgrounds, and act to build relationships between students across group identities”; restorative justice, which includes no police or military presence in schools, no metal detectors, no criminalization of students, and divestment from the school-­to-­ prison pipeline; and representative school faculty, meaning “faculty that is inclusive and elevates the voices of communities of color, immigrant communities and the LGBT community so that student identities and experiences are reflected in the leadership.”62 SDAG’s executive committee said it was “inspired by students” to adopt the five Rs, specifying that four of the five Rs “apply to all schools, irrespective of enrollment.” The advisory group asserted: “Because not all schools can be integrated quickly does not mean that some shouldn’t be.” It estimated that nine of the city’s thirty-­two community school districts “have sufficient socioeconomic diversity to meet our goals for economically integrated schools.”63 On June 10, 2019, de Blasio and Carranza announced that the city had accepted sixty-­two of the panel’s sixty-­seven recommendations, with two rejected and three still under review. A Gotham Gazette article published later that month recounted that since his appointment as chancellor, Carranza had required implicit-­bias training for all teachers; “eliminated the use of ‘limited unscreened’ enrollment policies in high schools, which gave priority to applicants who attended admissions fairs to show interest and were thought to favor students with more engaged and wealthier parents”; and urged the state legislature to abolish the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), which determines admission to the city’s eight specialized high schools. The three most prestigious of these schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech) have very low enrollments of Black and Latino students and are controlled by the state. The city could eliminate the SHSAT in the five other specialized schools that it controls, but de Blasio argued that he did not wish to create a two-­tiered system.64 The mayor had proposed that the top 7 percent of academic performers from each

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middle school be offered admission to the specialized schools.65 In late June 2019, the state legislature adjourned without taking up the specialized schools bill on the floor: De Blasio is not well-­regarded in Albany; Governor Andrew Cuomo did not actively back the bill; and a groundswell of support from legislators never materialized. Ronald Lauder, a Bronx Science graduate and billionaire heir to a cosmetics empire, spent several million dollars on an advertising and lobbying campaign to reject the legislation and advocate smaller-­scale efforts to diversify the specialized schools, such as free universal test preparation and more Gifted and Talented programs, which were likely to have marginal impact.66 SDAG’s first report includes many detailed proposals pertaining to the five Rs, as well as goals, metrics, and accountability. In the latter category, the DOE adopted a modified SDAG proposal that the department set short-­term diversity goals at the elementary and middle school levels based on district demographics, and at the high school level based on borough demographics. In the long term, the DOE acknowledged that it “should aim for all schools to look more like the city” and “challenge the neighborhood segregation that exists.” The DOE agreed to “expand its definition of representative to include a broad range of racial groups,” rather than simply considering the combined Black and Latino percentage in schools. It also vowed to encourage “communities, schools, and districts to strive to enroll MLLs [Emergent Multilingual Learners] and SWDs [Students with Disabilities] in proportions close to district averages.” The DOE declined to create the position of Chief Integration Officer, which would have assigned a person to monitor integration citywide rather than at the district level. It did adopt SDAG’s recommendation to “track and publish a single set of metrics related to diversity in an annual report.” SDAG co-­chair and 2021 mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, previously counsel to de Blasio, opined that the diversity metrics were a “game changer” that would ensure accountability.67 With regard to Race, Diversity and Enrollment, the DOE softened SDAG language to require the nine districts with sufficient demographic diversity to develop diversity and integration plans, opting instead “to strongly support and encourage” them. The DOE similarly scaled back SDAG language that would have required districts to “analyze controlled choice, screens, gifted and talented and other admissions policies and programs” for their effects on school diversity. SDAG’s recommendations to increase accessibility and integration of students with disabilities were adopted, with one minor exception, by the department.68

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With respect to Resources, one of SDAG’s recommendations was to “launch a task force to recommend equitable funding strategies.” The DOE adopted a modified version that would launch a task force “to make recommendations to increase capacity for PTAs overall.” Here, it appears that the DOE was reluctant to anger PTAs that raise enormous amounts of money to supplement appropriations for their school. Large disparities in PTA fundraising, linked to the socioeconomic profile of school parents, contribute to the vast divergence of resources available to schools. PTA money cannot be used to pay teachers but can fund supplemental staff such as teaching assistants and art teachers. Those dollars can also be used to fund after-­school programs and other services not in the official school budget. Public data released in December 2019 revealed that only one in fifty PTAs in New York City raised more than $1,000, but a select few raised over $1 million, and in at least one case over $2 million.69 Among other recommendations that it accepted, the DOE agreed to invest in programs and offerings “that will attract more diverse families to schools they might not have considered before” and to ensure “high poverty schools have the same curricular, extra-­curricular and after-­school opportunities as schools in more affluent communities.” The DOE adopted SDAG’s recommendations for empowering students, including creating a student leadership team from each Borough Student Advisory Council to meet regularly with the chancellor (SDAG had proposed quarterly meetings), and creating “a new leadership position within the central DOE office to focus on student voice.” SDAG’s eight recommendations on culturally responsive education were approved by the DOE, with one exception: the last three words in the proposed requirement to “implement ethnic and culturally responsive courses for all students” were excised by the department. One notable rejection of SDAG’s recommendations in the School Climate section was to “analyze the benefits and drawbacks of moving School Safety Agents to DOE supervision from NYPD supervision.”70 The SDAG report also requested an update on a 2015 mayoral task force examining restorative justice in schools and proposed several steps to increase staff diversity in city schools.71 INYC was heartened that SDAG had adopted the five Rs framework. Zaps reflected: There are some folks who say, “We’ve had reports before. We’ve had commissions before”. . . . And I don’t think we should ever mistake that process as the

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change. We know that implementation is really where people’s lives are [and] the difference is made. . . . The first step is to get the agreement to the thing itself. And so in that way, [SDAG] represented a huge step forward, in getting not only the Department of Education, but dozens of organizations and individuals aligned around a vision for an integrated school system based on the 5 Rs. That was not the discussion that was being had in this city several years earlier. . . . That is meaningful. We’ve actually heard from educators, from folks we’ve never met, that the Department of Education is talking to them about the 5 Rs in their school. That’s incredibly significant.72

New York Appleseed’s Nyah Berg agreed that the DOE’s adoption of sixty-­two of the sixty-­seven SDAG recommendations in the first report and the endorsement of the 5 Rs framework was a “huge win” for integration advocates.73 Nevertheless, proponents remained cognizant that implementation of a robust integration and equity plan would come only through sustained political pressure. In the spring of 2019, prior to the June 10 announcement, student-­led integration groups became more vocal in their criticisms of the DOE under de Blasio. At a May 1 hearing before the City Council, Teens Take Charge chief operations officer Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye put the department on notice in riveting testimony: You, the DOE, speak a lot about needing to look at more data. But while you continue to look at data, a student is traveling an hour and a half to get to school, because the school that is a block away from her house does not have enough resources. One student is playing ultimate frisbee at a school that offers dozens of sports while another student is going home because his school does not offer him enough resources, or any sports at all. So what are you going to say to me today? You need more time to study the issue? You want another task force or diversity group? You need some data, more reports, you want community forums? Let us address segregation today. Let us address the fact that after 65 years of Brown v. Board of Education, we are still struggling with the idea of separate but equal. Let us address the fact that we’re the most diverse city in the world and yet we have one of the most segregated school systems in the country. That is shameful, that’s a student coming to you talking about that. I should be in class learning about commas.

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She closed her remarks memorably: “I’ve heard a lot of adults say how much they love hearing from student voice, how much they value us. I agree, I agree: student voice is great. But you know what I prefer? Adult action. So until you start backing up your words, I don’t want to hear your compliments. Thank you.”74 Clearly, Ndiaye and her colleagues had no patience for the administrative checkpoint strategy that city politicians and education officials had relied on regularly to delay action since the Brown decision. Teens Take Charge had set a deadline for the last day of the 2018–­19 school year, June 26, for the administration to announce a comprehensive high school integration plan. With no plan announced, nearly two dozen TTC members sat in at City Hall to protest the city’s lagging progress on school integration. One TTC student, Marcus Alston, said Carranza’s exhortations “to integrate the schools won’t do anything unless I see policies that will actually integrate the schools.” They were joined by City Council members Brad Lander and Mark Treyger. Outside City Hall, a counter-­protest demanded Carranza’s resignation for his proposals to change admissions policies of the city’s prestigious specialized high schools. Television footage showed a group of primarily white and Asian adults, a stark contrast to the multiracial group of students inside. One counter-­protestor claimed that Carranza’s proposed policy changes were “very divisive, pitting one minority group against the other.”75 Carranza had drawn intensified scrutiny after three longtime DOE administrators, all of whom are white, claimed in a lawsuit that they were demoted for racial reasons. In June 2019, the conservative New York Post columnist Bob McManus attacked Carranza’s “reckless race rhetoric . . . [which] should disturb anyone with memories of the last race-­driven crisis in city schools—­the near-­ catastrophe at Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, in 1968.”76 That same month, seven City Council representatives and two State Assembly members—­all but one of whom are white—­wrote to de Blasio, recommending that he replace Carranza if the chancellor continued to “divide the city.” From this perspective, the city could be whole only if its inhabitants blithely ignored long-­standing inequalities; talking about race, rather than racism itself, was the problem. Council member Daniel Dromm was not surprised: “As soon as you start to talk about implicit bias or culturally responsive education, you could’ve put money on it that you’re going to get this kind of backlash. Which is why no other chancellor would go near the issue to begin with.” De Blasio said that Carranza was “doing a great job” and

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would not be relieved of his post. Carranza deemed it “kind of rich when there are inequities happening in a system and the minute you start pointing out those inequities and actually working to change those inequities it becomes divisive.”77 Despite his pique at the criticism, by the end of summer 2019 Carranza acknowledged that system-­wide integration would require nothing short of a miracle.78 Instead, he and de Blasio sought to spur smaller-­scale, non compulsory efforts, earmarking $2 million for the development of additional voluntary district integration plans on top of those adopted by District 15 (Brooklyn) and District 3 (Upper West Side and Harlem in Manhattan). Carranza maintained that in order for integration measures to endure, the school system would first need to resolve more nuts-­and-­bolts issues, such as reliable school bus service and adequate services for students with disabilities. Desegregation, he said, is like “a beautiful paint job on a car,” but “that car’s not going anywhere” if more basic issues have not been solved.79 SDAG released its second set of recommendations in August 2019. In this report, the advisory group directly confronted the contentious issue of screening—­in other words, restricting admission to schools and programs based on measures such as test scores, grades, attendance, and residential location. SDAG proposed the elimination of Gifted and Talented (G&T) programs in elementary schools, and the unscreening of all middle schools and some high schools, though not the eight specialized high schools over which the state legislature has partial control. The Times reported that roughly a quarter of NYC middle and high schools are screened, far more than in any other US city. Screened schools typically have disproportionately white and Asian enrollments; the same is true for elementary G&T programs, which accept entering kindergarten students on the basis of a standardized test. In its introduction to the report, SDAG’s executive committee contends that “existing use of screens and Gifted and Talented programs is unfair, unjust and not necessarily research-­based. As a result, these programs segregate students by race, class, abilities and language and perpetuate stereotypes about student potential and achievement. This must change . . . with deliberate action and clear-­eyed commitment to excellent schools.” According to the Times, the mayor has the authority “to adopt some or all of the proposals without input from the State Legislature or City Council.” De Blasio, who in August 2019 was still vying to be the Democratic nominee for president, was noncommittal when asked for his initial response to the second SDAG report.80

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Teens Take Charge (TTC), which focuses on high school advocacy for integration and equity, declined to sign onto the second report. Coco Rhum, who served as the TTC representative on SDAG from late 2018 to the release of the second set of recommendations, said the organization supported recommendations to eliminate middle school screens and G&T programs but found the proposals on high schools “incredibly weak,” due to SDAG’s caution on eliminating high school screens and its lack of specific demands or insistence on a detailed timeline for implementation.81 Shortly after the release of the second recommendations, de Blasio said he would take “the whole school year for deep stakeholder engagement” on the SDAG proposals. And then . . . nothing. De Blasio’s February 2020 state-­of-­ the-­city address made no mention of school diversity, with the exception of a goal to put “an additional 1,000 men of color on the path to becoming teachers by 2022, doubling our previous goal of 1,000 that was hit in 2018.”82 The next month, New York City schools shifted to remote learning as the COVID-­19 pandemic hit the city with blinding fury. Understandably, the DOE turned its focus almost exclusively to the transition to online instruction, attempting to ensure that students had adequate access to computers and internet access, as well as basic needs such as food. Matt Gonzales, who serves on SDAG and is founder and director of the Integration and Innovation Initiative at NYU Metro Center, told me in June 2020 that Carranza has been very supportive of SDAG, but the panel got “thrown under the bus by de Blasio.”83 Taylor McGraw, who helped launch Teens Take Charge, adjudged that de Blasio “has done nothing to integrate schools. He has not put out a single proposal. He has not endorsed a single idea. The only thing he’s done is put together a task force that spent two years coming up with recommendations that he is now ignoring.”84 A District-­wide, Middle School Integration Policy Despite deep disappointment with de Blasio’s anemic leadership on school integration and equity, activists could point to some incremental progress. In October 2017, District 15 became the first community-­led, district-­wide integration initiative in NYC.85 For 2019–­20 admissions, district schools dropped meritocratic middle school screening, which was implemented in the late 2000s and had resulted in schools with vastly divergent racial and socioeconomic profiles. Under

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the new admissions plan, all schools reserved 52 percent of their seats for children who are low-­income, English-­language learners, or reside in temporary housing; this benchmark reflected the proportion of those populations in the district as a whole. Previously, more affluent, primarily white students were concentrated in the eastern part of the district where they lived (Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope), and which included several highly regarded schools that screened for high grades, strong state test scores, and attendance. Lower-­income Asian, Hispanic, and Black students were concentrated in the western part of the district (Sunset Park, Red Hook, and Borough Park).86 Though some parents whose children were expected to attend the higher-­ performing middle schools were concerned about the new admissions process, community members, parents, and educators were highly involved in the planning process. Youth groups such as INYC also played key roles in creating the plan. In May 2020, Zarith Pineda, who served on the planning team for District 15 integration, presented results from the first year of unscreening at a virtual meeting commemorating the sixty-­sixth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She presented evidence revealing that previously existing screens substantially reduced the pool of Black and Latino students who were eligible for admission to the more sought-­after district schools. For example, 62 percent of Asian students and 42 percent of white students met the screens for both standardized test scores (in fourth grade) and fewer than five absences and five tardies; only 16 percent of Black and 17 percent of Latino students did so. On its face, on-­time school attendance may seem a reasonable proxy for student and family commitment to education. However, Black students have substantially longer commutes than students of other backgrounds, which puts them at the mercy of disruptions in public transportation. Moreover, Black and Latino students experience higher rates of asthma—­a prominent cause of absences—­than white students.87 What appears to be race-­neutral is nothing of the sort. By removing screens, district schools experienced increased racial and socioeconomic diversity, more students were admitted to the school they ranked first on the application, and no noticeable white flight took place. As Pineda wryly observed, “Nothing terrible happened, no one died, nothing collapsed.”88 The district’s City Council representative, Brad Lander, described the community feedback his office had received:

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During the spring and summer of 2019, after D15 families received their 6th grade placements via the new admissions process adopted as part of the D15 Diversity Plan in the fall of 2018, we heard from several families dissatisfied with their placement and with the process that led to their placement. This was predominantly either parents who felt there were extenuating circumstances (e.g., emotional/mental health issues, parent scheduling conflicts, twins) that should allow their child to attend a particular school, or parents that did not receive any of their choices in the lottery and wanted to appeal. This year [2020] we have not received any communications about dissatisfaction with the middle school admissions process or outcomes, although that observation should be strongly tempered by the issues parents are facing this year with COVID, remote learning and school reopening. We have heard about parents leaving the district—­but only for COVID-­related reasons, not because of middle school placements.89

District 3 in Manhattan, with roughly similar demographics to District 15, also launched a middle school integration plan for the 2019–­20 school year. However, District 3 retained academic screens and set substantially less ambitious targets for prioritizing the admission of economically disadvantaged students. Consequently, while economic and racial segregation declined in District 15 by 55 percent and 38 percent, respectively, District 3 experienced very modest reductions.90 Sustained Pressure by Students Student activists continued to push for bolder and more far-­reaching action on integration. On November 18, 2019, Teens Take Charge (TTC) coordinated a walkout of students in two high schools that share a building on 6th Avenue in SoHo: the Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School (CTE) and NYC iSchool. The iSchool uses academic screens, while Chelsea CTE does not. TTC reported that the iSchool student population is 41 percent white and 40 percent low-­income, whereas CTE is 4 percent white and 80 percent low-­income. The SoHo strike lasted 1,800 seconds (thirty minutes), representing the number of public schools in New York City. The organizers sought to fuel public dialogue about school integration and admissions screens and give the two student populations a rare chance to interact.91 Sarah “Zaps” Zapiler from INYC commented that many people outside New York City “can’t even imagine that there are multiple schools in one building,” much less “that they are segregated and differently

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resourced” and feature different kinds of relationships and discipline policies while being “divided by just a staircase.”92 TTC organizer Carmen Lopez Villamil offered these observations: Bringing the protests to schools made [segregation] sort of unavoidable, which meant that students had to talk about this issue and decide whether they were for integration or against it. And I thought that that was kind of genius on the part of the [TTC] public action team. . . . The first few ones were at co-­located schools, so they had students who were in the same buildings, but who have vastly different resources, just because one school was screened and one wasn’t, one was white and one was Black and Brown.

She continued: TTC “got [students at the schools] to be like, okay, so we go to the same school, let’s talk about it. Why is this happening and what are we going to do about it? Then it sort of moved to other schools, but I think it’s really just starting those conversations within schools and then tying them to the larger city and how those bigger systems affect every single student.”93 After seven TTC-­led strikes, the youth organization hosted a panel in January 2020 to discuss integration and equity issues with DOE officials. The department representatives maintained that the DOE was taking “bites at the apple” by backing local integration initiatives, as in Brooklyn’s District 15, but emphasized the need for community buy-­in. Two TTC panelists used sports teams, which are funded by the DOE, to compare inequitable resource allocation. The prestigious Beacon High School has over twenty-­five sports teams. At the high-­achieving but less renowned Brooklyn College Academy, there are two. (A pending class action lawsuit contends that racial inequity in sports programs contravenes New York City’s human rights law.94) When asked whether the de Blasio administration planned to reduce or eliminate discriminatory admissions screens, Deputy Chancellor for Early Childhood Education and Student Enrollment Josh Wallack admitted that the DOE isn’t “remotely close to doing enough . . . but we’re working on it.” He declined to offer a timeline on the removal of admissions screens.95 The students in attendance also addressed issues including the use of metal detectors in schools and the representativeness of school staff. Zoe Simpson maintained that “the faculty who look like me and I can identify with are the correctional officers. They’re the people I can go to when my teachers feel disrespected in the classroom or they feel their white fragility has been challenged.”96

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TTC, INYC, and other youth organizations had just begun to plot the specifics of a May 18 citywide boycott when COVID-­19 devastated New York City, resulting in the cancellation of the event.97 The student groups intended for the protest action to invoke the 1964 citywide boycott (see chapter 3). Responding to my observation that the planned 2020 boycott would have been far more student-­driven than its predecessor, INYC executive college director Leanne Nunes agreed wholeheartedly: “We always want what we do to be by students, with students, for students, and no decision should be made for us if we were not involved in that decision-­making process.” The organizers were “trying to pull from our own experiences and as much of history as possible to get the outcome we wanted.”98 TTC’s Nelson Luna echoed this historical connection to New York City school activism, explaining that the boycott would have showed “other young people that this is a continued fight and that we can live up to the expectations of a generation before us.” Students who learned about the 1964 boycott and participated in the 2020 one “would have been forever changed [in] how they . . . understand education and inequity and inequality in New York, how they understand organizing and activism. So that was kind of the dream with it.”99 INYC’s Zaps stated that the organization seeks to be “unprecedented.” In envisioning the 2020 boycott, members asked: “What is going to move us beyond this moment? Because despite the incredible commitment and turnout and action on that day [in 1964], we didn’t see material changes for the conditions of the people” impacted by segregation. “Of course,” she emphasized, “as we thought we were going to be planning something unprecedented, the most unprecedented event in our lifetime [the COVID-­19 pandemic] happened.”100 The boycott was expected to draw upon the organizing capabilities of a number of youth-­led educational advocacy organizations. INYC and TTC members are careful to clarify that those two organizations are not the only youth-­led organizations seeking bold educational reform in New York City. Referring to the “Five Rs of Real Integration,” INYC interviewees emphasized that some youth groups focus on restorative justice, resources, or other issues that overlap with their group’s focus. Other groups, such as the Asian American Student Advocacy Project, center the voices of their communities in the integration movement. INYC and other activists often refer to a movement “ecosystem” where different groups and individuals play complementary roles in the fight for educational

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justice.101 Adult-­led groups, such as New York Appleseed and the New York City Alliance for School Integration and Diversity (NYCASID), fight alongside student activists in pressuring the city to reshape its education system.102 The battle will continue as a new mayoral administration takes office in 2022. Richard Carranza stepped down as chancellor in March 2021; de Blasio named Meisha Ross Porter as Carranza’s replacement, making her the first Black woman to lead the NYC school system.103 The new mayor will likely appoint a new chancellor. Unquestionably, activists will continue exerting pressure to ensure that the post-­COVID, new normal for New York City public schools will produce a school system that is markedly more just, more equitable, and more integrated than its inadequate predecessors. Despite decades of activists unsuccessfully demanding that NYC education officials act decisively on the side of integration, one can detect seeds of hope that the 2020s will produce a bold new direction for the city school system. Whereas earlier periods of activism featured adults as leaders and spokespeople, the current wave of activism is student driven, which offers a powerful challenge to supporters of the status quo. As Zaps of INYC stated, “Our whole work is principled on the idea that young people know the issues of segregation best because they are the ones being segregated.”104 The activists often point out that they are the ones who directly experience the damaging impact of segregation and inequity in the school system. They are the ones who suffer from a lack of resources, criminalization of students, and a teaching staff that often does not reflect their experiences. They will not be silenced.

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Learning from the Past and Moving Forward

is not for the easily discouraged. In the nearly seven decades since the Brown decision, educational activists and Black parents, sometimes joined by Latinos, have mounted an exhausting, courageous, and frequently disheartening quest to assure that their children receive the education they deserve, whether via integration, community control, or some other means. They have run up against corrosive white racism in purportedly progressive New York City, not just from bureaucrats and school staff, but by white parents in neighborhoods such as Glendale-­Ridgewood, Jackson Heights, and Canarsie. They have witnessed the cruel disregard for the welfare of students living in the Tilden Houses and continue to confront the buttoned­up racism of parents who insist that the two-­tiered education system is fair and meritocratic. In the main, the Board of Education (now renamed the Department of Education) has parried demands for educational justice with halting attempts at appeasement, accompanied by explanations of why it was unable or unwilling to be more proactive in its response. Even some individuals who are unequivocally committed to racial justice and equity question whether integration is the solution. For example, the Black scholar Mary Pattillo has identified the “conundrum of integration politics: promoting integration as the means to improve the lives of Blacks stigmatizes Black people and Black spaces and valorizes Whiteness as both the symbol of opportunity and the measuring stick for equality. In turn, such stigmatization of Blacks and Black spaces is precisely what foils efforts toward integration. After all, why would anyone else want to live around or interact with a group that is discouraged from being around itself?” Later in the same essay, Pattillo reminds us that “integration is a strategy to achieve equality, not the substance of equality itself. As a strategy, it is flawed by assumptions that have the inherent potential to backfire and undermine the effort.”1 PRO-­I NTE GRATIO N A C TIV ISM

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Pattillo’s critique should be taken seriously. Whether one is convinced that her appraisal is damning pivots on what one means by a call for “integration.” Advocating for the city to ensure that every public school in New York City is 15 percent white (to reflect the white student representation in the system) and assuming this would guarantee a quality education for all would be preposterous. It would also be virtually impossible, unless large numbers of students were willing to travel daily between Staten Island and the Bronx, which could take two hours each way. This is not the type of integration that student activists are demanding. They envision a school system in which there are no longer a clearly identifiable set of “good schools”—­populated primarily by white and Asian students, with ample resources, responsive faculty, and an array of courses and extracurricular activities—­and a much larger contingent of “bad schools”—­populated by Black, Latino, and some Asian students, and lacking those characteristics. Student leader Leanne Nunes remarked that IntegrateNYC does not want to “just move people around” to achieve numerical integration, a step that would “play into the idea that proximity to whiteness is what would fix things, because that’s not true.” Cognizant of the demographics of the public school system, the organization does not think about integration only in terms of “who’s in the school, because it’s not just about who’s there. It’s also about what you’re getting, what you’re learning, and how you’re treated in that building. . . . Those things can oftentimes correlate with who’s there. There are schools that are integrated demographically . . . but there are still large disparities in their access to resources as well as their access to mental health supports or even whether or not the students are criminalized.” She points out that schools with large proportions of economically disadvantaged students, like her high school, are compelled to devote “energy and resources . . . to just making sure that a lot of the students are having their basic needs met.” Schools with low proportions of economically needy students can devote resources elsewhere. “Those types of disparities don’t need to exist,” she asserts.2 Importantly, an increasing number of students who purportedly won the intense admissions competition are publicly voicing their disillusion with the process. In particular, students of color who attend prestigious public schools can feel that they have paid a high price for attending the “right” school. Danielle Johnson, a first-­generation Black student who is a director at INYC, attends the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx; it is one of the specialized high schools that admits students solely on the basis of their SHSAT score. The student population there is around 5 percent Black, 14

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percent Latino, 21 percent Asian, and 54 percent white. (The Bronx population is 9 percent non-­Hispanic white. Lehman College, where I teach, has an undergraduate population that is 32 percent Black and 51 percent Latino.)3 At a spring 2020 virtual event, she disclosed: “Everyday walking through those doors I feel alienated, like a single piece of black pepper in a sea of salt. . . . School should be considered your home away from home, yet all I can feel at school is out of place.” Johnson recounted that she and her fellow Black students often “feel like we have to prove that we belong, not only to our peers but to ourselves.” During the same event, a youth leader of the Asian American Student Advocacy Project (ASAP) shared her plaintive testimony: People seem to think that Asians are only one thing, or maybe they only hear one thing. “Speak up,” my white teacher eggs me on, and so I do. I speak my mother’s trauma. . . . I speak being trapped in a school with white peers and feeling like not even a person compared to their brown hair and blue eyes and interesting lives, articulated in perfect English.4

The experiences of these two students underscore the notion that even numerically integrated schools may fall short of “real integration” if they merely mix bodies.5 Even many of the “winners” lose out. Creating a system in which all New York City youth are able to attend a school in which they feel part of a nurturing community, one that has sufficient resources and opportunities—­rather than having to choose between these options—­drives student-­led groups. The privileges of attending “good” schools can be invisible to the beneficiaries. Coco Rhum, a TTC member (and former INYC member) who is currently a college student, recalled that she was “shocked” to learn in a presentation at her high school that segregation still thrived in New York City. Rhum, who is white and attended predominantly white, screened schools in middle and high school, “took a step back and looked at all of my schools and looked at who I was friends with and realized that . . . I was complicit in perpetuating school segregation in my actions and in my schools.” She added: “I don’t think if someone hadn’t told me I would have known, because we really tell ourselves lies about how progressive our city is and how progressive our school system is, especially when you’re in a white, liberal community like the one I grew up in. Certainly no one wants to call themselves a racist, but they also want to perpetuate and benefit from the inequalities of the school system, which are fundamentally racist.”6

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Since the 1950s, one persistent counterargument to aggressive integration and equity measures has been that middle-­and upper-­class white families will exit the school system, increasing segregation and reducing public support for the school system. SDAG’s executive committee warned: “If New York City loses students to private schools or families move to other locations, it will become even more difficult to create high-­quality integrated schools that serve the interests of all students.”7 However, in recent years, a number of education advocates have pushed back against this logic. David Kirkland, the executive director of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, wondered in an op-­ed, “Why would a school system value retaining families at the expense of families who have nowhere else to go?”8 The Bell’s Taylor McGraw expresses skepticism about the probability of additional white flight if schools are unscreened and questions why education officials should be concerned if the white school population decreases from 15 to, say, 12 percent. Moreover, he contends, for those white parents who are fearful that less screening and more integration will harm their children, “you were probably creating a toxic environment” in your children’s school. “If you don’t want to be a part of ” a more egalitarian school system, “that’s your choice.”9 McGraw raises the pressing question of what costs the lion’s share of students should be made to pay in order to retain a much smaller group who are incentivized with highly resourced, prestigious schools geared toward them. The tab paid by the majority of students has been far too high, and the benefits to advantaged students have been cordoned off from other students. If the informal white veto of more egalitarian educational policies was ever justifiable—­a highly debatable proposition—­it certainly is not so in the current era, given the size of the white public school population. Lessons and Next Steps This case study is not generalizable, but New York City’s methods of managing school segregation are not unique among large cities with substantial Black or Latino populations. NYC was and remains a system with some social fluidity and some shining examples of Black and Latino academic excellence; a high degree of residential segregation, which impacts but does not exonerate school segregation; widespread but not absolute school segregation; and a large number of segregated Black and Latino schools with less experienced teaching staffs, fewer

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resources, higher drop-­out rates, and more intrusive surveillance of students than their more privileged counterparts. In the decades after Brown, Chicago’s predominantly Black schools were often overcrowded, sometimes resulting in schools scheduling shortened “double shifts” to accommodate students; class sizes were larger; per-­pupil expenditures were substantially lower than in predominantly white schools; and fewer full-­time teachers were on staff. Community members launched sit-­ins and boycotts for integration. Voluntary transfer programs resulted in relatively few students transferring to more integrated schools. Neighborhood schools at the younger level were sacrosanct. This history sounds a lot like New York’s.10 While no two cities mirror one another in terms of demographics, school plants, accessible travel options, and so on, a deep dive into a single case provides clues into how large cities attempt to manage school segregation and integration in the face of competing pressures to expand or dismantle policies that foster equity and integration. What are the lessons from the earlier period of educational activism? First and foremost, focus on what school officials do, rather than what they say. As with some of the school system chiefs before him, Richard Carranza extolled the virtues of integration and by all accounts believes deeply in this goal. But without a mayor who is firmly committed to this objective and is willing to resist the political pressure to maintain the status quo, the chancellor has little power to drive transformative change. Individual schools or districts also have limited power to drive a comprehensive revisualization of the school system. If, for example, one of the most competitive screened high schools were to drop its screens, the outcomes would be difficult to predict. The school could demonstrate that it continues to foster academic excellence without a cherry-­picked cohort, it could fail in this objective, or it could simply become a school that is no longer appealing to families with other options. However, if all screened schools were compelled to admit students on a bell curve—­with most students in the middle range of academic achievement and smaller numbers at the higher and lower ends—­then we would begin to see which schools had produced favorable outcomes simply because they admitted well-­prepared students and which ones could continue to provide strong educational experiences without a stacked team. The city’s education bureaucracy has a long history of creating a commission to study an issue, delaying release of its recommendations, diluting the recommendations, then implementing them in half-­hearted fashion, if at all. The

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Commission on Integration, the Allen Report, and the Bundy Report provide glaring illustrations of this mode of operation. The same scenario appears to be repeating itself with the SDAG reports, which have languished since their release. Similarly, education officials in New York City have had the propensity to launch a touted experiment, then decline to extend it, as with school pairing, or end it before it can be evaluated fairly and fully, as with community control. Activists must scrutinize and expose the administrative checkpoints of interminable delays and abrupt endings. Pro-­integration groups face the daunting task of monitoring the system of administrative checkpoints, and their impact on segregation, throughout an enormous school system. Echoing Annie Stein’s observation in chapter 5, if they are able to convince one school to dismantle its Gifted and Talented program, ten new G&T programs could be launched elsewhere in the city, increasing segregation. Far-­reaching vigilance is essential, and many boots on the ground are needed. The concerns of current integration advocates reach well beyond changes in the demographic composition of student bodies. With SDAG’s adoption of INYC’s Five Rs of Real Integration, the DOE cannot make a plausible case that demographics forestall progress toward integration. Ironically, the purportedly separatist community-­control movement laid the foundation for twenty-­first century integration. The treatment of students within schools (which includes decriminalizing them), a culturally inclusive curriculum, and a staff that looks more like them and shares some of their experiences were key pillars in the demands of community-­control advocates. This expanded vision of integration does not limit itself to curated, statistical integration and does not depend on changes to the racial and ethnic composition of New York City students. School demographics do, however, often map onto measures of school quality. For example, according to a New York Appleseed study based on data from 2009 to 2012, majority-­white schools in New York City continued to have a higher percentage of qualified teachers (measured by numbers with advanced degrees, valid teaching certificates, and so on) and less teacher turnover than schools where the majority were students of color. The same links between school demographics and measures of school quality and resources that HEW uncovered in the 1970s persist in present-­day New York City.11 It is difficult to overstate COVID-­19’s disruption of the status quo on school operations in New York City—­and indeed throughout the world. This massive

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health crisis undeniably diminished the DOE’s attention to the demands for twenty-­first-­century integration. At the same time, student activists also sensed an opportunity for the pandemic to highlight disparities that have been exacerbated since March 2020. TTC’s Whitney Stephenson admitted that COVID is “definitely a setback” for the integration movement, but it is also a chance to confront education officials: “You can’t escape what you’re seeing. This pandemic is . . . forcing you to look straight . . . at the flaws” that exist in the education system.12 In one survey, only 51 percent of teachers in high-­poverty schools reported that the majority of their students were involved daily in remote learning, compared to 84 percent of teachers in wealthy schools. Access to technology, competing home responsibilities, and pandemic-­related stress all likely contribute to the remote-­learning engagement gap. Students of color, students with physical or learning disabilities, English-­language learners, and homeless students have all endured intensified hardships in the COVID era, but their struggles did not begin in March 2020.13 The New York City Department of Education finds itself at a crossroads. Much of the data used for screened admissions was missing as the DOE formulated student assignment policies for the 2021–­22 school year: no state test scores, no letter grades for middle-­school students, unreliable attendance data, and no in-­person interviews or school-­specific evaluations.14 The DOE could use the disruption created by the global pandemic to rethink its admissions policies going forward. “If we were starting from scratch today, I like to think that we would design” a system that privileged equity and did not employ screens, Taylor McGraw reflected. “But the problem we have here . . . is that in order to get to that system . . . there’s a whole lot of undoing” that would have to take place. Politically speaking, that would be a monumental lift. “Of course,” McGraw said, “if we really cared about equity and if it wasn’t just a catch phrase, that’s exactly what we would do.”15 On December 18, 2020, Mayor de Blasio and the DOE belatedly shared the process for 2021–­22 middle and high school admissions. Most notably, de Blasio announced that middle school admissions would be completely unscreened for at least the upcoming admissions cycle. Currently, roughly two hundred middle schools, or around two-­fifths of the total number, screen applicants.16 District priorities allowing students to attend school close to home will remain in place. Schools that give preference to underserved groups such as English-­language learners and students eligible for free and reduced-­price lunch (FRPL), such as those in District 15, can continue doing so. Schools that admit only by lottery,

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without diversity preferences such as those just named, may not see substantial changes in their school demographics, particularly if they are located in districts lacking diversity.17 The city acted more cautiously at the high school level. It did, however, eliminate district priorities for admissions permanently, with other geographic priorities sunsetting the following year. Controversy about the district priorities had long been centered around Manhattan’s District 2, which incorporates some of the city’s most affluent and disproportionately white neighborhoods, including the Upper East Side, Tribeca, and the West Village. Three days before the announced changes to admissions, three principals of prestigious high schools in that district called on the city to end geographic preference. Dimitri Saliani is the principal of Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the Upper East Side. The school’s enrollment in 2019–­20 was two-­thirds white; Black and Latino students comprised 3 and 9 percent of students, respectively. Fewer than one in five students qualify for FRPL. While the school had altered its admissions policies, increased diversity in faculty and staff, and made its curriculum more culturally inclusive, it still found at itself “at a place of stasis,” he said. He called on the city to remove “the anachronistic District #2 priority that is a barrier to most students in NYC. The lack of diversity among students, faculty and staff is a disservice to our community as a whole.”18 As for screening devices other than location of residence, the DOE instructed: “Schools can choose to remove or alter their screens in the year ahead, or they may maintain them. Schools that maintain academic screens are encouraged to make a concerted effort towards greater equity in their processes, either by electing to remove additional screens now, or implementing a Diversity in Admissions” plan that prioritizes admissions of students who are low-­income, English-­language learners, students in temporary housing, and so on.19 The department announced no changes to specialized high school admissions.20 Although the city planned to continue the Gifted and Talented entrance test for four-­year-­olds for one final year, those plans were scuttled by a rejection of the proposed testing contract by a city education panel. For 2021–­22, the G&T program will rely on evaluations from students’ pre-­K teachers, and families can sign up for their child to be interviewed for admission.21 De Blasio leaves office on December 31, 2021. The fate of middle and high school screens will lay largely at the feet of his successor, likely to be Eric Adams. That person will have to navigate between passionate advocates at both ends

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of the screening debate. Yiatin Chu, co-­president of the pro-­screening Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, said the city’s relaxation of screening “is lowering the bar for everyone. The mayor likes to talk about equity and excellence. To me, this is neither.” Brandon Luce, co-­director of policy at Teens Take Charge, supports the unscreening of middle schools and contends that the same step should have been taken in high school admissions. De Blasio is “more afraid of White parents, who are the minority of parents in the school system, than helping the majority of students,” Luce asserted.22 The first year of the District 15 middle school admissions change suggests that unscreening, enacted thoughtfully, can lead to a higher quality, more fulfilling education for the many students who have been denied this opportunity. It will require unprecedented political courage to ignore the white veto and make these changes to admissions policies—­and not just on a one-­time basis. Implementing changes to the admissions process for a single year would create a problematic dynamic in which “a cohort of COVID students” are “completely identifiable moving forward,” Nyah Berg observed.23 The physical and administrative checkpoints that were constructed in no small part to divide New York City students by race and class should be dismantled. If the meritocratic checkpoint of screening is to be retained, schools should be required to admit student cohorts with a range of academic achievement, rather than a small number of schools vying for only the most polished (and often disproportionately wealthy) students. Even if such a scenario comes to pass, one should not expect NYC to solve all the complex issues that urban school systems have confronted for decades. Perfect statistical integration will not happen, and that is okay. If the proposed changes enable far more New York City youth to experience and benefit from twenty-­first-­century integration, this will be a remarkable, worthwhile achievement. Since Brown, defenders of the New York City school system have often asserted what the school system was not. It was not Mississippi. It was not Little Rock. It was not the exclusionary suburbs. With actions, not mere words, it is well past the time for New York City to show what it has long claimed to be: a place where everyone, including students, has the opportunity to thrive.

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Notes

Abbreviations for Archival Collections Allen Papers = James Edward Allen Papers, SC20854, New York State Archives, Albany, NY. BDP = Bernard Donovan Papers, Series 490, Board of Education Records, NYC Municipal Archives. CIP = Commission on Integration Papers, Series 261, Board of Education Records, NYC Municipal Archives. Clark Papers = Kenneth B. Clark Papers, MSS78303, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Galamison Papers = Milton Galamison Papers, Micro 85, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. HHC = Henry Hampton Collection, Film and Media Archive, Washington University Libraries, St. Louis, MO. (Pauses and self-­corrections have been eliminated from interview transcripts for Eyes on the Prize.) Javits Papers = Senator Jacob K. Javits Collection, SC 285, Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY. NAACP Papers = Papers of the NAACP, Part 03: The Campaign for Educational Equality, Series D: Central Office Records, 1956–­1965, group III, series A, General Office Files, Desegregation—­Schools, ProQuest History Vault, folder 001516-­006-­0428, Brooklyn school desegregation efforts, http://congressional. proquest.com/histvault?q=001516-006-0428. NYSED Papers = New York State Education Department Commissioner’s History File, B0460, New York State Archives, New York State Education Department, Cultural Education Center, Albany, NY. Parrish Papers = Richard Parrish Papers, Additions 2, Sc MG 491, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Ribicoff Papers = Abraham Ribicoff Papers, MSS59386, Library of Congress, ­Washington, DC. 241

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Shapiro Papers = Rose Shapiro Papers, Series 385, Board of Education Records, NYC Municipal Archives. UFT Papers = United Federation of Teachers Papers, WAG.022, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University. UPA Papers = United Parents Associations Papers, Series 911, Board of Education Records, New York City Municipal Archives. Wilcox Papers = Preston Wilcox Papers, Sc MG 235, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Periodicals CDD = Chicago Daily Defender NYAN = New York Amsterdam News NYDN = New York Daily News NYHT = New York Herald Tribune NYP = New York Post NYT = New York Times WP = Washington Post WSJ = Wall Street Journal Chapter 1 1. Eliza Shapiro, “Desegregating N.Y. Schools Was His Top Priority. What Happened?” NYT, Aug. 23, 2019. 2. Quoted in In the Matter of Charlene Skipwith and Another, 14 Misc. 2d 325 (1958), Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York, Children’s Court Division, New York County, https://www.leagle.com/decision/195833914misc2d3251234. 3. Quoted in Skipwith. 4. “Offer ‘Free Choice’ Policy to End Jim Crow in N. Y. Schools,” CDD, Jan. 21, 1964, 5. 5. Ford Fessenden, “A Portrait of Segregation in New York City’s Schools,” NYT, May 11, 2012, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/11/ nyregion/segregation-in-new-york-city-public-schools.html?searchResultPosition=1#; UCLA Civil Rights Project, “New York Schools Most Segregated in the Nation,” press release, March 26, 2014, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014press-releases/new-york-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation/CRPRelease_NY-v6. pdf; Danielle Cohen, NYC School Segregation: A Report Card from the UCLA Civil Rights Project, June 2021, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/

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integration-and-diversity/nyc-school-segregation-report-card-still-last-action-needednow/NYC_6-09-final-for-post.pdf. 6. Daniel H. Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 7. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–­Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 24. 8. Jennifer Ayscue and Erica Frankenberg, “Desegregation and Integration,” last modified Feb. 25, 2016, in Oxford Bibliographies, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/ document/obo-9780199756810/obo-9780199756810-0139.xml. 9. Ansley T. Erickson identifies a similar distinction between “statistical desegregation” and “other broader, and crucial ambitions,” such as “an egalitarian ethos in schools, social learning between young people, [and] full equality of opportunity and outcome across racial categories.” Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 21. 10. Lesley Oelsner, “Goal of Integration in Schools Elusive,” NYT, Nov. 20, 1977, 1. 11. Augustus Trowbridge, Begin with a Dream: How a Private School with a Public Mission Changed the Politics of Race, Class and Gender in American Education (Xlibris, 2005), 105. 12. Rucker C. Johnson (with Alexander Nazaryan), Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works (New York: Basic Books, 2019). For overviews of the history of school segregation and resegregation and of the effects of integration and segregation on students, see also Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Sean F. Reardon and Ann Owens, “60 Years after Brown: Trends and Consequences of School Segregation,” Annual Review of Sociology, 40 (2014): 199–­218; Jomills Henry Braddock II and Tamela McNulty Eitle, “The Effects of School Desegregation,” in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, ed. James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass, 2004), 828–­43; Erica Frankenberg, Jongyeon Ee, Jennifer B. Ayscue, and Gary Orfield, Harming Our Common Future: America’s Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown, UCLA Civil Rights Project, May 10, 2019, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/ integration-and-diversity/harming-our-common-future-americas-segregated-schools65-years-after-brown/Brown-65-050919v4-final.pdf. The website of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA includes a trove of research related to school segregation and related issues: https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/. 13. Annie Stein, “Strategies for Failure,” Harvard Educational Review 41, no. 2 (May 1971): 161, 164–­65. Ansley T. Erickson makes a related point in noting that “planners and real estate developers identified schools as defining features of neighborhoods, and property markets valued connections between housing and schools.” Via school siting,

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zoning, and student assignment, “schools helped to segregate the metropolitan landscape.” Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis, 9. 14. The School Diversity Advisory Group’s second set of recommendations was released in August 2019. As discussed in chapter 8, the de Blasio administration showed no indication of acting on the recommendations before the COVID crisis emerged in March 2020. 15. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). 16. Demographics and other information on Stuyvesant and Beacon High School can be found, respectively, on the InsideSchools website at https://insideschools.org/ school/02M475 and https://insideschools.org/school/03M479. 17. On the long history of racialized tracking in NYC schools, see, for example, Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 18. High school student (name withheld upon request), presentation at Brown @ 66: The State of Integration in NYC, virtual conference coordinated by IntegrateNYC, Teens Take Charge, Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, New York Appleseed, NYU Metro Center, and Territorial Empathy, May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JDNm1moyOA0&feature=youtu.be; Taylor McGraw (The Bell), video interview by author, July 22, 2020. See also Elizabeth A. Harris and Ford Fessenden, “The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools,” NYT, May 5, 2017. 19. Summons, IntegrateNYC vs. The State of New York, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, March 9, 2021, https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ ViewDocument?docIndex=jHAVRjM/0VBF2bxhnEz7aA==. 20. I discuss this dynamic in chapter 9. 21. On the use of meritocratic ideals to justify racial inequality, see Eduardo Bonilla-­ Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-­Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, “Introduction: Histories of Racism and Resistance, Seen and Unseen: How and Why to Think about the Jim Crow North,” in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of The South, ed. Purnell, Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 22. Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power; Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2016). 23. For example, in his recent history of Flint, Michigan, Andrew R. Highsmith explains the “shifting structures of the color line” by highlighting three levers that maintain segregation—­legal, administrative, and popular—­which involve varying combinations of state and non-­state actions. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint,

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Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8. For a far-­reaching critique of colorblind education policies, see Amy Stuart Wells, Seeing Past the “Colorblind” Myth: Why Education Policymakers Should Address Racial and Ethnic Inequality and Support Culturally Diverse Schools (Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center, 2014), http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ seeing-past-the-colorblind-myth. 24. Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Dale Mezzacappa, “No Easy Solutions to the Problem of Fewer Black Teachers and Less Diversity on Philly School Staffs,” Chalkbeat Philadelphia, Dec. 26, 2018, https://philadelphia.chalkbeat. org/2018/12/26/22186318/fewer-black-teachers-disappearing-diversity-among-philadelphia-school-staffs-has-no-easy-solutions. 25. Christina Collins, “Ethnically Qualified”: Race, Merit, and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920–­1980 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011); Perrillo, Uncivil Rights. 26. Camille Walsh, Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–­1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 27. Kate Rubinowitz et al., “How the Nation’s Growing Racial Diversity Is Changing Our Schools,” WP, Sept. 12, 2019; NYC Department of Education, “Demographic Snapshot—­Citywide, Borough, District, and School,” SY 2014–­15 to 2018–­19—­All Grades, April 17, 2019, link to Excel file at NYC DOE InfoHub, “Demographic Snapshot,” https://infohub.nyced.org/reports-and-policies/citywide-information-and-data/ information-and-data-overview. 28. DOE, “Demographic Snapshot.” These demographic proportions have fluctuated over the decades. For example, according to 1989–­90 data, the demographic proportions at the elementary level were 20.7 percent white, 38.7 percent Black, 7.5 percent Asian, and 33.1 percent Latino. See John Kucsera with Gary Orfield, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future, UCLA Civil Rights Project, March 2014, Table 22, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/ integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-ExtremeSegregation-2014.pdf. 29. Urban Institute, “Segregated Neighborhoods, Segregated Schools?” Nov. 28, 2018, https://www.urban.org/features/segregated-neighborhoods-segregated-schools. 30. Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 50. 31. Milton Galamison, interview by Robert Penn Warren, June 17, 1964, Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt722804xt2k. 32. Karen R. Miller, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 19.

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33. Kathleen A. Hauke, Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 34. Ted Poston et al., “Prejudice and Progress: The Negro in New York III,” NYP, April 18, 1956, 4, 60. Several articles in the series are reprinted in Kathleen A. Hauke, ed., Ted Poston: A First Draft of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). 35. Poston, “Prejudice and Progress.” 36. Poston, “Prejudice and Progress.” 37. Poston, “Prejudice and Progress.” 38. Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 39. Matthew D. Lassiter, “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27–­28. 40. Purnell and Theoharis, “Introduction,” 3, 7. 41. See NYC Department of Education, “Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza Announce Adjusted K-­12 Citywide Grading Policy for 2019–­20 School Year,” announcement, posted May 1, 2020, https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/news/announcements/ contentdetails/2020/05/01/mayor-de-blasio-and-chancellor-carranza-announce-adjustedk-12-citywide-grading-policy-for-2019-20-school-year. Chapter 2 1. Superintendent of Schools, Toward Greater Opportunity, June 1960, CIP, box 5, folder 41. 2. Kenneth Clark, interview by Blackside, Nov. 4, 1985, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–­1965), HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eop;cc =eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=cla0015.0289.020. None of Clark’s comments appeared in the series. Discussion of Brown decision in Nat Hentoff, “The Integrationist,” New Yorker, Aug. 23, 1982, 37–­73. 3. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 4. Clark used a similar logic in explaining the 1964 riots in Harlem, asserting that this “weird social defiance” embodied hope for a brighter future rather than despair. Daniel Matlin, On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 86. See also Daryl M. Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–­1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). On the doll test not being the fulcrum of Clark’s testimony, see NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), “Brown at 60: The Doll Test,” http://www.naacpldf.org/brown-at-60-the-doll-test.

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5. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (New York: Knopf, 1975), 483, 502; Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Kenneth Clark testified at three of the five Brown trials. Mamie Clark, who had devised the “doll test,” testified in at least one of the cases. See NAACP LDF, “Brown at 60.” 6. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Matlin, On the Corner. 7. Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power. 8. C. Gerald Fraser, “P.S. Super OK’s N.Y. Segregation,” NYAN, June 5, 1954, 1. 9. “Amsterdam News Accuses Jansen of Supporting ‘New York Segregation,’” New York Teacher News, June 19, 1954, 1, Clark Papers, box 56, folder 1. 10. Hentoff, “The Integrationist.” 11. Hentoff, “The Integrationist”; Woody Klein, “Biography of Kenneth B. Clark,” Appendix 1, in Toward Humanity and Justice: The Writings of Kenneth B. Clark, Scholar of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision, ed. Woody Klein (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 203–­5. 12. Hentoff, “The Integrationist,” 47; Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power. 13. Hentoff, “The Integrationist.” 14. Matlin, On the Corner, 44. 15. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 148. 16. Ransby, Ella Baker, 149. 17. Ransby, Ella Baker. 18. Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power; Ransby, Ella Baker. List of attendees in Clark Papers, box 56, folder 2. 19. Kenneth B. Clark, speech, “Segregated Schools in New York City,” “Children Apart” Conference, New York City, April 24, 1954, Clark Papers, box 56, folder 5. 20. Janet L. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). In quotations, and in some of my own words, I use the outdated term ghetto to capture the language that was most frequently used at the time. Ghetto typically referred to segregated, low-­income, predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. 21. Clark, speech, April 24, 1954. 22. C. Gerald Fraser, “Harlem Students Learn Inferiority,” NYAN, May 1, 1954, 1. 23. Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power; Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland:

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University of California Press, 2016), 30. The Intergroup Committee had its roots in the 1952 and 1953 meetings at the Clark home. 24. Kenneth B. Clark, opening remarks, Annual Meeting of Urban League of Greater New York, June 21, 1954, Clark Papers, box 56, folder 12. 25. Kenneth B. Clark to Colonel Arthur Levitt, July 16, 1954, Clark Papers, box 56, folder 8. See also “Segregation in N.Y. Schools Is Charged,” Civil Liberties in New York (New York Civil Liberties Union newsletter), Nov. 1954, 2, Clark Papers, box 56, folder 1; Leonard Buder, “City Schools Invite Inquiry of ‘Jim Crow’ Allegations,” NYT, July 14, 1954, 1. 26. S. L. Latimer Jr., “South Carolina Plans to Study Northern Segregation System,” Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, July 18, 1954, 4F. 27. New York City Board of Education, Let Us Break Bread Together, directed by Edward G. Bernard (1954, New York), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVjqxbCGTRw. 28. Superintendent of Schools, Toward Greater Opportunity, June 1960, CIP, box 5, folder 41; Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974); Erwin Knoll, “N.Y. Schools Have ‘Ghetto’ Problem,” WP, Oct. 5, 1958, E3. 29. Leonard Buder, “City Schools Cleared in Segregation Study,” NYT, Nov. 7, 1955, 1; Ravitch, Great School Wars. 30. Leonard Buder, “City Schools Open a Major Campaign to Spur Integration,” NYT, July 24, 1956, 1; David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System (New York: Random House, 1968). 31. Superintendent, Toward Greater Opportunity; Rogers, 110 Livingston Street. 32. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 21. 33. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 241. 34. Charles Silver to Milton Galamison, July 12, 1956, CIP, box 1, folder 2; Jacob Javits, prepared remarks for meeting at JHS 258, “Segregation in Schools of Bedford-­Stuyvesant,” Oct. 29, 1956, Javits Papers, series 11, box 10, folder New York State 1956. 35. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. 36. “N.A.A.C.P. Rebukes City Board for All-­Negro Brooklyn School,” NYT, Nov. 2, 1956, 29. 37. Benjamin Fine, “Integration Gain Cited by Jansen,” NYT, Nov. 16, 1956, 29. 38. Kenneth Clark to Charles Silver (Board of Education president), Nov. 2, 1956, CIP, box 1, folder 3. 39. Roy Wilkins to June Shagaloff, memorandum, Jan. 3, 1957, Papers of the NAACP, part 03: The Campaign for Educational Equality, series D: Central Office Records, 1956–­ 1965; Group III, series A, General Office Files, Desegregation—­Schools, folder 001516-­ 006-­0428, Brooklyn school desegregation efforts (accessed in ProQuest History Vault), http://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=001516-006-0428.

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40. Wilkins to Shagaloff, Jan. 3, 1957. 41. Ransby, Ella Baker, 155. 42. Ransby, Ella Baker. See also Kristopher Bryan Burrell, “Black Women as Activist Intellectuals: Ella Baker and Mae Mallory Combat Northern Jim Crow in New York City’s Public Schools during the 1950s,” in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South, ed. Brian Purnell, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 89–­112. 43. Peter B. Bart, “New York City Regroups Pupils in Effort to Abolish Northern Form of Segregation,” WSJ, Jan. 29, 1957, 12. 44. “Jansen Clarifies Findings on Bias,” NYT, April 11, 1957, 35. 45. Agnes E. Meyer, “Race and the Schools,” Atlantic, Jan. 1958, 29–­34. 46. Meyer, “Race and the Schools”; Commission on Integration, “Balance Sheet on Agnes Meyer’s Article—­Atlantic Magazine, January 1958,” CIP, box 1, folder 11. 47. Meyer, “Race and the Schools.” 48. CI, “Balance Sheet.” 49. Lawrence Friedman to Charles Silver, Jan. 19, 1957, CIP, box 1, folder 9. 50. Beas Haley to unknown, Feb. 14, 1957, CIP, box 1, folder 5. 51. G. William Delamar to Board of Education members and Superintendent Jansen, n.d., CIP, box 1, folder 8. 52. Paul Zuber to Charles Silver, June 25, 1956, CIP, box 1, bolder 8. On the common claims that individuals who paid more in taxes deserved a greater say in public policy, particularly with regard to segregation, see Camille Walsh, Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–­1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); and Bonastia, Southern Stalemate. 53. Paul Zuber to Charles Silver, June 11, 1956, CIP, box 1, folder 8. 54. John McNamara to Board of Education, March 27, 1957, CIP, box 1, folder 10 (ellipses are McNamara’s). 55. O’Neil and Nillson to Board of Education, n.d., CIP, Box 1, Folder 10. 56. Negro Teachers Association, statement, Jan. 17, 1957, CIP, box 1, folder 9. Evidently, this was not the same organization that later became the African-­American Teachers Association. 57. Concetta Roy (High School Teachers Association), statement, CIP, box 2, folder 13. 58. Ella Rose (Teachers Alliance), statement, CIP, box 2, folder 13. In her seminal history of the New York City school system, Diane Ravitch cautioned against the notion that early-­twentieth-­century NYC schools punched the ticket to social mobility for waves of immigrants. These schools “performed no miracles” for first-­and second-­generation European immigrants, featuring “rigid and irrelevant” curriculums, overcrowded classrooms, and many teachers—­themselves often second-­or third-­generation Irish or Germans—­who

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“had no special affection for the immigrant children or for their parents’ strange culture.” The mobility that did occur owed as much to a growing economy that provided jobs for many youth who did not enroll in college, or even complete high school, as it did to the public school system. Ravitch, Great School Wars, 244. 59. William A. Pfeffer (Cambria Heights Civic Association), statement, CIP, box 2, folder 13. 60. May Healy (Joint Committee of Teacher Organizations), statement, CIP, box 2, folder 13. 61. Rose Shapiro, remarks at CI public hearings, Jan. 17, 1957, CIP, box 2, folder 14; George Barner, “Teacher Groups Oppose Integrating NY Schools,” NYAN, Feb. 2, 1957, 5. 62. Knoll, “N.Y. Schools Have ‘Ghetto’ Problem.” 63. Knoll, “N.Y. Schools Have ‘Ghetto’ Problem.” 64. Adina Back, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth’: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-­1980, ed. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65–­91; Burrell, “Black Women as Activist Intellectuals.” 65. Ashley D. Farmer, “‘All the Progress to Be Made Will Be Made by Maladjusted Negroes’: Mae Mallory, Black Women’s Activism, and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 514. Notably, when accorded scholarly attention, Mallory is typically depicted “narrowly as an organizer of the Black Power era. Yet Mallory, who was active from the 1950s to the 1990s, was a ‘long-­distance runner,’ an organizer who embraced a range of organizational strategies and affiliations, engaged in extensive coalition building,” and drew connections between multiple social justice movements. 66. Back, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth,’” 74. 67. In the Matter of Charlene Skipwith and Another 14 Misc. 2d 325 (1958), Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York, Children’s Court Division, New York County, https://www.leagle.com/decision/195833914misc2d3251234. 68. Skipwith. 69. “City Plans Appeal in School Boycott,” NYT, Jan. 4, 1959, 21; Back, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth,’” 65–­91; Rogers, 110 Livingston Street. 70. The Board of Estimate, composed of the five borough presidents and three citywide elected officials, was abolished in 1990, with most of its authority reassigned to the city council. See Sam Roberts, “Years After It Was Abolished, A City Board Lives On,” NYT, Aug. 20, 2012, https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/ years-after-it-was-abolished-a-city-board-lives-on/. 71. Superintendent, Toward Greater Opportunity.

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72. One of the students was a Black woman, two were white women, and one was a white man. 73. Kenneth B. Clark, “Preliminary Report on the Observations in Ten Subject Schools Five Years after the PEA Report (Draft #1),” Nov. 4, 1959, Clark Papers, box 56, folder 14. 74. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 142; Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power. 75. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 404; Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power. 76. See Charles M. Payne, So Much Reform, So Little Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2008). 77. See, for example, Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974); Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Christopher Bonastia, Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Keeanga-­Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Chapter 3 1. Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 2. Janet L. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 3. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 4. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots. 5. James J. Morisseau, “School Board Presses Shift of Pupils,” NYHT, June 2, 1959, 10; Leonard Buder, “Negro Pupils Get Transfer Option,” NYT, June 2, 1959, 38; “This Is One City,” editorial, NYT, June 27, 1959, 22 (double shifts); “Pupil Transfer Backed,” NYT, June 20, 1959, 19 (empty-­seat estimate). 6. Don Ross, “Test of School Shift at Hand,” NYHT, Sept. 13, 1959, 31. 7. Jackie Robinson, undated column (ca. June 1959, possibly from Long Island Star-­ Journal), UPA Papers, box 69, folder 55. Robinson recounts the objections to the transfer plan described in this paragraph and quotes from the Glendale Register. 8. “Parents Predict Smooth Transfer,” NYAN, June 20, 1959, 21. 9. Gene Currivan, “1,000 Bedford Pupils Ordered Transferred Out of Area by Bus,” NYT, June 24, 1959, 63; “This Is One City,” NYT. 10. Arch Parsons, “Rival Pickets at City Hall Debate Transfer of Pupils,” NYHT, June

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26, 1959, 11; Robert Alden, “2 Groups of Pickets Score City’s Plan to Transfer Pupils,” NYT, June 26, 1959, 1. 11. John Wicklein, “Realty Scare Hit by Queens Clergy,” NYT, Aug. 16, 1959, 16. 12. L. B. Kolin, letter to the editor, NYT, July 8, 1959, 28. 13. Leonard Buder, “Board Restudies Negro Pupil Shift,” NYT, July 24, 1959, 27. 14. “Glendale Threatens to Sue,” NYAN, Aug. 1, 1959, 18. 15. “‘No Little Rock in New York’ School Problem,” Baltimore Afro-­American, July 4, 1959, 19. 16. Leonard Buder, “Mothers Appeal Pupil Transfers,” NYT, Aug. 27, 1959, 56. 17. Gladys Meyer (United Parents Associations of New York City), “Parent Action in School Integration,” 1961, UPA Papers, box 69, folder 56, 28. 18. Homer Bigart, “Pupil Shift Near; Tensions Quieted,” NYT, Sept. 13, 1959, 61. 19. Bigart, “Pupil Shift Near.” 20. Laurence Barrett, “971 Whites Boycott 5 Schools in Queens,” NYHT, Sept. 15, 1959, 1; Homer Bigart, “Whites in Queens Keep Pupils Home in Transfer Fight,” NYT, Sept. 15, 1959, 1. 21. Leonard Buder, “White Pupils End Queens Boycott,” NYT, Sept. 16, 1959, 1; Buder, “Schools Picketed in Queens Again,” NYT, Sept. 19, 1959, 25. 22. Bernard Gavzer, “Here’s What Happened When N.Y. Transferred Its Students,” Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, Sunday edition, Oct. 11, 1959, 3C. 23. “Court Extends Study of Negro Pupil Move,” NYAN, Nov. 14, 1959, 20. 24. Sara Slack, “Search Negro Pupils,” NYAN, Feb. 6, 1960, 17; “NAACP Acts on Mass Search of Pupils,” NYAN, Feb. 20, 1960, 27. 25. The Supreme Court’s 1968 Green v. New Kent County (391 U.S. 430) decision severely restricted the use of “freedom of choice” and other devices that did not produce unitary school systems. 26. Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 3. In 1960, thousands of white Detroit parents launched a boycott to reject the transfer of three hundred Black students from their overcrowded school to one in a white neighborhood. 27. Cited in Commission on School Integration, National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials, Public School Segregation and Integration in the North (Washington, DC: Nov. 1963), 30, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015009322101&view=1 up&seq=40&q1=gallup. 28. Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle for School Integration in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 29. “Take Theobald over Coals on School Bias,” NYAN, April 30, 1960, 19; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 100.

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30. “Take Theobald,” NYAN; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door; Lisa Yvette Waller, “The Pressures of the People: Milton A. Galamison, the Parents’ Workshop and Resistance to School Integration in New York City, 1960–­1963,” Souls 1, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 31–­45; Parents’ Workshop, press release, April 25, 1960, Galamison Papers, reel 2, segment 26. 31. Milton Galamison to John Theobald, June 10, 1960, Galamison Papers, reel 2, segment 27. 32. Quoted in Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 101. 33. Waller, “Pressures of the People.” 34. Leonard Buder, “City’s Million Negroes Still Face Color Barrier Despite Big Gains,” NYT, March 13, 1962, 1. 35. David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System (New York: Random House, 1968). 36. United Parents Associations, “Progress Report to the New York Fund for Children,” 1962, UPA Papers, box 69, folder 56. 37. Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). 38. Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow, 207. 39. Joseph R. Viteritti, “Times a-­Changin’: A Mayor for the Great Society,” in Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream, ed. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), 1–­25. 40. Sam Pope Brewer, “School Question Upsets Families,” NYT, Sept. 20, 1959, 126. 41. US Census Bureau, “Census of the Population: 1960,” vol. 1, part 32 (New Jersey), https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/edisontownship1960.pdf; Rachel Mark, “Reputation and Reality in America’s Model Town: Remembering Racial Integration in Teaneck, New Jersey, 1949–­1968,” senior thesis, History Department, Columbia University, 2011, https:// doi.org/10.7916/D86W9J2S. In 1965, Teaneck became the first town in the US to vote to integrate its school system without a court order. 42. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 54. 43. Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy: 1960–­1972 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1990). The concept of withholding federal funds from recipients that practiced racial discrimination was eventually incorporated into Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 44. Biondi, To Stand and Fight. 45. “Roster of Freedom Riders,” WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, http://www. pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/roster/. 46. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, reissue ed., 1992 [1965]), 276.

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47. This discussion of Freedom Schools in Prince Edward County draws upon Christopher Bonastia, “Black Leadership and Outside Allies in Virginia Freedom Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 4 (November 2016): 532–­59. For an expanded analysis of the school closings in Prince Edward, see Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 48. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Sandra Adickes, Legacy of a Freedom School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 49. “Planning the March on Washington,” Newsweek, Sept. 2, 1963, republished Jan. 19, 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/planning-march-washington-300305; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-­Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001), 187. 50. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. 51. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 52. “Hoodlums Try to Start Riot,” NYAN, May 18, 1963, 1. 53. James Booker and Les Matthews, “Harlem Seething, Cops Double Force,” NYAN, June 22, 1963, 1. 54. “The ‘Revolution’ Spreads All Over New York,” NYAN, July 27, 1963, 1. On Downstate Medical Center, see also Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow. 55. Layhmond Robinson, “New York’s Racial Unrest: Negroes’ Anger Mounting,” NYT, Aug. 12, 1963, 1. 56. Les Matthews “‘Bronx Is a Bomb, Ready to Explode!’” NYAN, July 13, 1963, 1. 57. “The School Integration Crisis Count Down to December 1, ’63,” NYAN, Sept. 14, 1963. 58. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door; Ravitch, Great School Wars. 59. Alfred T. Hendricks, “City Moving to Prevent Pupil Boycott,” NYP, Jan. 6, 1964, 2. 60. NYC Board of Education, “Plan for Integration,” Aug. 23, 1963, Allen Papers, box 4, folder 24. 61. “Wilkins Shifts Stand on the School Boycott,” NYP, Jan. 8, 1964, 3. 62. Richard Montague and Alfred T. Hendricks, “For the Schools—­6. Boycott: Only A Beginning?” NYP, Magazine 4, Feb. 2, 1964, 22. 63. “New Beginning in the Schools,” editorial, NYP, Feb. 3, 1964, 22. 64. “The Dispute Is How Much Integration,” NYHT, Feb. 2, 1964, 32. 65. Stanley Penn, “The Princeton Plan,” WSJ, April 20, 1964, 20. 66. Terry Ferrer, “The Bus-­Riding Controversy,” NYHT, Feb. 2, 1964, 32; Rogers, 110 Livingston Street.

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67. “Offer ‘Free Choice’ Policy to End Jim Crow in N.Y. Schools,” CDD, Jan. 21, 1964. “Sick” quote in Robert E. Baker, “The Dilemma of Big City Education,” WP, Jan. 26, 1964, E3. 68. CDD, “Offer ‘Free Choice’ Policy.” 69. CDD, “Offer ‘Free Choice’ Policy”; Jackie Robinson, “Calls Cry for Freedom a ‘Jingle,’” Chicago Defender (national edition), Jan. 4, 1964. Robinson was a nationally syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News from 1959 to 1960 and for the Amsterdam News from 1962 to 1968. See Karl Helicher, review of Michael G. Long (editor), Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life After Baseball (Syracuse University Press, 2013), Foreword Reviews, Summer 2013, https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/ beyond-home-plate/. 70. Ted Poston, “Donovan Blasts Plan for Boycott,” NYP, Jan. 16, 1964, 2; Mylas Martin, “Donovan Driven to Blunt Words,” NYHT, Feb. 3, 1964, 1. 71. “Toward School Integration: A Big Step,” editorial, NYP, Jan. 21, 1964, 28; Albert Ellenberg, “Boycott Due Despite New School Plan,” NYP, Jan. 20, 1964, 3. 72. NYC Board of Education, “Plan for Better Education through Integration,” Jan. 1964, Allen Papers, box 4, folder 24; Leonard Buder, “Board Completes Integration Plan for City Schools,” NYT, Jan. 29, 1964, 1. 73. Bernard Bard, “Boycott Chiefs Say 50,000 Will Stay Out,” NYP, Feb. 2, 1964, 3. 74. Terry Ferrer, “Boycott—­Tomorrow is the Fateful Day: Meanwhile, Preparation, Worry and Wrath,” NYHT, Feb. 2, 1964, 32. 75. “N.Y. Boycott Huge Success!” CDD, Feb. 4, 1964, A3. 76. Sara Slack, “The March on the ‘Bd. Of Ed.’” NYAN, Feb. 8, 1964. 77. Ferrer, “Boycott.” 78. Leonard Buder, “Boycott Cripples City Schools,” NYT, Feb. 4, 1964, 1; “N.Y. Boycott,” CDD; Albin Krebs, “Donovan Calls Boycott ‘A Fraud’ and ‘A Bust,’” NYHT, Feb. 4, 1964, 7. 79. Krebs, “Donovan Calls Boycott ‘A Fraud.’” 80. Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 122. 81. Annie Stein, “Strategies for Failure,” Harvard Educational Review 41, no. 2 (May 1971): 158–­204. 82. Buder, “Boycott Cripples City Schools.” 83. Jimmy Breslin, “Two Children,” NYHT, Feb. 4, 1964, 17. 84. James A. Wechsler, “Who ‘Fizzled’?” NYP, Feb. 4, 1964, 22. 85. Joseph Michalak, “15,000 in ‘Anti-­Busing’ March Around City Hall,” NYHT, March 13, 1964, 1; Robert Walsh and Edward O’Neill, “15,000 Busing Foes Stage Protest,” NYDN, March 13, 1964, 3. The Joint Council later dropped “Brooklyn” from its name.

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86. Peter Kihss, “New Group Fights Mass Pupil Shifts,” NYT, Oct. 3, 1963, 20; David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System (New York: Random House, 1968), 77. 87. Peter Kihss, “Widespread Opposition Is Found to Pupil Transfers Here,” NYT, March 12, 1964, 1. 88. McCandlish Phillips, “A Young, Aroused Mother of 6 Is Typical of School Marchers,” NYT, March 13, 1964, 20. 89. Stanley Penn, “The Princeton Plan,” WSJ, April 20, 1964, 20. 90. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street; Mrs. Florence Flast, president of United Parents Associations, remarks at Fall Round-­Up, Sept. 26, 1964, UPA Papers, box 70, folder 67. UPA membership claims in UPA, press release, Jan. 18, 1965, UPA Papers, box 66, folder 9. 91. Leonard Buder, “City to Transfer Pupils This Fall for Integration,” NYT, May 29, 1964, 1. 92. “Puerto Ricans and Negroes Join Hands,” NYAN, March 7, 1964, 1 (Valentín quote); Sara Slack, “Emotions High at Rally” NYAN, March 7, 1964. 93. Fred Powledge, “1,800 Join March for Better Schools,” NYT, March 2, 1964, 1. 94. “Puerto Rican Leader,” NYT, March 2, 1964, 18. 95. Joseph Michalak, “CORE Baits the Police Twice,” NYHT, March 7, 1964, 1. 96. Joseph Michalak, “2d School Boycott Monday; Talks Fail,” NYHT, March 14, 1964, 1. 97. Joseph Michalak, “Boycott Tomorrow a Showdown,” NYHT, March 15, 1964, 23. 98. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. 99. Martin G. Berck, “2d Boycott Today Will Test Rights Split,” NYHT, March 16, 1964, 1. 100. Terry Ferrer and Joseph Michalak, “2d School Boycott Only Half as Big,” NYHT, March 17, 1964, 1; Simon Anekwe, “Powell, Galamison Call Boycott Big Victory especially in B’klyn,” NYAN, March 21, 1964. 101. Delmont, Why Busing Failed. 102. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street. 103. Sonia Song-­Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Regarding the March on Washington speech, see Gilberto Gerena Valentín and Carlos Rodríguez-­Fraticelli (2013), Gilberto Gerena Valentín: My Life as a Community Activist, Labor Organizer, and Progressive Politician in New York City (New York: Center for Puerto Rican Studies Hunter College, CUNY, 2013). Gerena Valentín claims that over thirty thousand Puerto Ricans attended the March on Washington. 104. Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, 125. Newspapers at the time of the 1964 boycotts typically hyphenated Gerena-­Valentín. Recent commemorations of his life,

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and Gerena Valentín’s own autobiography, do not use a hyphen. Some work refers to him as Gerena, while other refers to him as Gerena Valentín. 105. Ferrer and Michalak, “2d School Boycott”; Sue Reinert, “At Boycott HQ, the Mood Is Triumphant,” NYHT, March 17, 1964, 11. Quotes in Ferrer and Michalak. 106. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door; Gerena Valentín, My Life as a Community Activist, 136. 107. Ravitch, Great School Wars, 257. 108. Jerald Podair makes a similar point in The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–­Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Chapter 4 1. David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System (New York: Random House, 1968), 13. 2. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 280–­81. 3. Ravitch, Great School Wars. 4. Sidney Kline, “School Plan Needs Millions: Donovan,” NYDN, May 14, 1964, 3. 5. State Education Commissioner’s (SEC) Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions, Desegregating the Public Schools of New York City, May 12, 1964, Series B0460, NYSED Papers, box 1, folder 64. 6. Jeremy Larner, “I.S. 201: Disaster in the Schools,” Dissent 14, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1967): 27–­ 40; “Excerpts from Report on School Integration in City,” NYT, May 13, 1964, 40. Larner is best known for his 1964 novel Drive, He Said, which was turned into a 1971 film directed by Jack Nicholson. Larner co-­wrote the screenplay. “Drive, He Said,” IMDb, https://www. imdb.com/title/tt0068509/. 7. Annie Stein, “Strategies for Failure,” Harvard Educational Review 41, no. 2 (May 1971): 167. 8. Larner, “I.S. 201”; “Excerpts from Report on School Integration.” 9. SEC Advisory Committee, Desegregating the Public Schools. 10. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 11. Robert H. Terte, “School Integration: Dispute Centers on the Way to Improve Negroes’ Education,” NYT, Oct. 22, 1963, 30. 12. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 116. 13. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 116–­17. 14. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 125. 15. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 207.

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16. Kenneth Clark, interview by Ed Edwin, April 7, 1976, “Notable New Yorkers (Kenneth Clark),” session 4, 159, Columbia University Libraries, Oral History Research Office, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/clarkk/audio _transcript.html. 17. Clark, interview by Edwin, May 10, 1976, “Notable New Yorkers (Kenneth Clark),” session 5, 210–­11. 18. Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle for School Integration in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 19. Michael W. Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 20. Milton Galamison, interview by Robert Penn Warren, June 17, 1964, Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt722804xt2k. These quotations occur between minutes 73 and 76. 21. Cited in Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 50. 22. Barry Goldwater, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco,” July 16, 1964, American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ index.php?pid=25973. 23. Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer; Janet L. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots. 25. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots. 26. George Barker, “Three Violent Days,” NYAN, July 25, 1964, 1. 27. Shapiro and Sullivan, quoted in Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots, 175. 28. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots. 29. For the number of two hundred, “Manhattan Rioting Crosses Bridge, Spreads to Brooklyn,” NYAN, July 25, 1964; for the number of five hundred, Flamm, Heat of Summer. 30. Peter Kihss, “Wagner Asserts Disorders Harm Negroes’ Cause,” NYT, July 23, 1964, 1; “Text of Wagner’s Radio-­TV Appeal for Restoration of Law and Order,” NYT, July 23, 1964, 12. 31. Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer. 32. Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots. 33. Jesse H. Walker, “‘Not A Race Riot’ Says Adam Powell,” NYAN, July 25, 1964. 34. Powell quote in “Adam Blasts Dr. King and Mayor,” NYAN, Aug. 15, 1964, 1. Rustin quote in Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–­65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 423.

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35. “The Talk Is Race,” Time, Aug. 7, 1964, 17; King quote in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Perennial Classics, 2004 [1986]), 344; Malcolm X quote in Branch, Pillar of Fire, 424. 36. “The Talk Is Race.” 37. “New York Dilemma,” Time, Feb. 7, 1964, 51. 38. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 81; Daniel Matlin, On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 39. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 61. 40. Arthur Everett, “Boycott by Whites Cuts N.Y. School Attendance,” WP, Sept. 15, 1964; “233,000 Boycott New York Schools to Protest Busing,” WP, Sept. 16, 1964. 41. Leonard Buder, “275,638 Pupils Stay Home in Integration Boycott,” NYT, Sept. 15, 1964, 1.  42. Buder, “275,638 Pupils.”  43. “City Threatening Arrests in Sit-­In at Queens School,” NYT, October 7, 1964, 1. 44. “City Threatening Arrests.” 45. “Mother with a Cause: Joan Addabbo,” NYT, Oct. 8, 1964, 39. 46. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 233, 232. On the critical role of Black women as foot soldiers and “bridge leaders” in the civil rights movement, see Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-­American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 47. Robert H. Terte, “65 Parents Seized at Queens School as Sit-­In Is Foiled,” NYT, Oct. 8, 1964, 1. 48. Bert E. Swanson, “Subcommunity Response to City-­wide School Policies: Measuring White-­Parent Decisions on School Pairing,” School Review 73, no. 4 (Winter 1965): 392–­409. 49. Peggy Streit, “Why They Fight for the P.A.T.,” NYT Sunday Magazine, Sept. 20, 1964. 50. Streit, “Why They Fight for the P.A.T. ” 51. Felix Kessler, “Integration Misfire,” WSJ, Oct. 12, 1966, 18. 52. Swanson, “Subcommunity Response”; Kessler, “Integration Misfire.” 53. St. Ann’s demographics available at http://www.usaschoolinfo.com/school/stanns-school-brooklyn-new-york.125560/enrollment; New York City demographics available at http://schools.nyc.gov/Accountability/data/default.htm (see Annual Enrollment Snapshots). 54. Leonard Buder, “A Year of School Pairing: High Hope—­And Bitterness,” NYT, May 17, 1965, 1; Buder, “School Pairings Called a Success,” NYT, Dec. 14, 1966, 58. 55. Midge Decter, “New York City Is in Agony over Education,” WP, Sept. 20, 1964, E5. 56. Fred Powledge, “Poll Shows Whites in City Resent Civil Rights Drive,” NYT, Sept. 21, 1964, 1.

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57. Powledge, “Poll Shows Whites in City,” 1. 58. Terry Ferrer, “White Foes of Boycott Get Busy,” NYHT, Aug. 13, 1964, UPA Papers, box 66, folder 9; Rogers, 110 Livingston Street. 59. Chet and Dot Fulmer, “The Board and the Bus,” Renewal Magazine, 1966 (month unknown), 14–­16, Wilcox Papers, box 10, folder 17; David Halberstam, “Whites Try Sit-­In at Negro School,” NYT, March 17, 1964, 25. 60. “Reverse Integration Called Big Success,” Baltimore Afro-­American, Oct. 8, 1966, 3. 61. Sidney Kline, “School Plan Needs Millions: Donovan,” NYDN, May 14, 1964, 3; Chet and Dot Fulmer, “The Board and the Bus.” 62. William Spiegler, “Some Don’t Mind Bus Ride to Integration,” Newsday, Nov. 18, 1964, 11. In January 1965, the Times ran a report on a neighborhood near the southern tip of Sheepshead Bay—­a sixteen-­block area bounded by East 12th and East 15th Streets and Gravesend Neck Road and Shore Road—­that had boasted stable residential and school integration for five decades. The area was around one-­third Black. See Martin Tolchin, “Residents Proud of Biracial Area,” NYT, Jan. 24, 1965, 45. 63. Chet and Dot Fulmer, “The Board and the Bus.” 64. Leonard Buder, “Schools Will Spend $750,000 to Gain Improved Integration,” NYT, Dec. 28, 1968, 33. The board announced in December 1968 that PS 83 in the Bronx would also become a “reverse Open Enrollment” school. However, the board had previously announced four additional reverse Open Enrollment schools in 1965, but the 1968 story in the Times did not mention them, so presumably that expansion was never implemented. See “White Pupils to Transfer to Promote Integration,” NYT, May 13, 1965, 22. 65. Commission on Integration, “Report—­P.T.A., P.S. 193, Brooklyn,” Jan. 3, 1956, UPA Papers, box 66, folder 13. 66. Theodore H. White, “Backlash,” Life, Oct. 16, 1964, 100A. 67. Ravitch, Great School Wars. 68. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 405; “1,000 in Vigil Defy Cold in Harlem,” NYT, Jan. 18, 1965, 27; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. The Times reported that Malcolm X did not take part in the vigil. 69. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street. 70. The year 1964 also included the shocking murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens and the subsequent reports that her neighbors ignored her cries for help as she was being attacked. Although recent research has cast doubt on this widely circulated narrative of neighborly indifference, the homicide fueled the suspicion that New York City was a heartless place that lacked community ties. See Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America (New York: Norton, 2014).

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Chapter 5 1. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2. Charles S. Isaacs, Inside Ocean Hill–­Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968–­69, Excelsior Editions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). 3. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–­Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Barbara Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power: The Story Behind the New York City Teachers’ Strike (New York: Citation Press, 1971). 4. Christina Collins, “Ethnically Qualified”: Race, Merit, and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920–­1980 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). 5. Melissa F. Weiner, Power, Protest and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 167. 6. Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 165. 7. Daniel H. Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 36; Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 113. 8. Bernard Rosenberg and Irving Howe, quoted in Perlstein, Justice, Justice, 40. 9. James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-­Semitic Because They’re Anti-­White,” NYT, April 9, 1967, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/ baldwin-antisem.html?mcubz=3. 10. Jane Anna Gordon, Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-­Jewish Conflict over Community Control in Ocean Hill–­Brownsville (1967–­1971) (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 72. Italics in original. 11. Weiner, Power, Protest and the Public Schools, 172. 12. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 13. Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Perlstein, Justice, Justice, 2, 10. 14. Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 119. For a summary of the perspectives of Podair, Perlstein, and Perrillo, see Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 15. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 16. Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 17. Richard Karp, “School Decentralization in New York: A Case Study,” Interplay, August-­September 1968, 9, UFT Papers, series 2, subseries 2B, box 52, folder 19. 18. John H. Niemeyer et al., “Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Decentralization,” July 1968, Shapiro Papers, box 1, folder 4.

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19. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 20. John Kifner, “Militant Priest of Ocean Hill Decries ‘Bureaucracy,’” NYT, Dec. 1, 1968, 153. 21. Reverend John Powis, interview by Blackside, Inc., for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985, Nov. 4, 1998, HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/ text/text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=pow5427.0840.133. 22. Annie Stein, “Strategies for Failure,” Harvard Educational Review 41, no. 2 (May 1971): 166. 23. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn. 24. “Brownsville Council Christening, Jan. 1,” NYAN, Jan. 2, 1965, 20; “All-­Night Watch Protests Building,” NYAN, Feb. 6, 1965, 3. 25. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn; Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle for School Integration in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Powis, interview by Blackside, Inc. 26. Stein, “Strategies for Failure,” 164. 27. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 137. 28. Clark, Dark Ghetto. 29. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 134. 30. Clark, Dark Ghetto, 137. 31. Harold V. Savitch, “Powerlessness in an Urban Ghetto: The Case of Political Biases and Differential Access in New York City,” Polity 5, no.1 (Autumn 1972): 19–­56. 32. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn. 33. Savitch, “Powerlessness in an Urban Ghetto.” 34. M. A. Farber, “7 School Plans Protested Here,” NYT, June 21, 1966, 43; Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn. 35. Douglas Robinson, “Mayor Walks Alone into Angry Crowd and Draws Cheers,” NYT, July 20, 1966, 1. 36. M. A. Farber, “Allen Approves Shift in Schools,” NYT, Aug. 29, 1967, 23; Steven V. Roberts, “First Steps Taken toward Creation of ‘Linear City,’” NYT, Nov. 13, 1967, 53; David K. Shipler, “Mayor Asks School Site Change Because of Linear City ‘Delays,’” NYT, Feb. 7, 1969, 26. 37. Farber, “Allen Approves Shift”; Roberts, “First Steps Taken.” 38. Roberts, “First Steps Taken.” 39. Shipler, “Mayor Asks School Site Change.” 40. Maurice Carroll, “Brooklyn Road Plan Halted by Lindsay,” NYT, May 4, 1969, 1. 41. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Politics of Expressways,” NYT, July 17, 1969, 51.

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42. Harold Siegel (executive director, United Parents Associations), statements on Educational Parks, June 16, 1965, UPA Papers, box 68, folder 37. 43. Robert A. Dentler, “A Sociologist Asks: Is the Education Park a Good Idea?” Paper for Arden House Conference on the Education Park Called by the New York City Superintendent of Public Education, June 23–­24, 1964, UPA Papers, box 68, folder 38. 44. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 206. 45. United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Preface,” in Education Parks: Appraisals of Plans to Improve Educational Quality and Desegregate the Schools, iii–­v (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1967); John H. Fisher, “The School Park,” in Education Parks, 1–­13. 46. Thomas F. Pettigrew, “The Metropolitan Educational Park,” Science Teacher 36, no. 9 (December 1969): 23–­26. 47. Dolores Torres, interview by Blackside, Inc., for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985, Oct. 31, 1988, HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/ text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=tor5427.0273.162. 48. Brownsville, Ocean-­Hill Independent Local School Board of District 17 to Board of Education et al., Oct. 10, 1966, Clark Papers, box 332, folder 1. 49. Powis, interview by Blackside, Inc.; Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn; Isaacs, Inside Ocean Hill–­Brownsville; Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 50. Torres, interview by Blackside, Inc. 51. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 276. “Practical alternative” quote in Bill Kovach, “Boos Fail to Stop Mayor, Shanker,” NYT, Oct. 19, 1968, 26. 52. Cannato, Ungovernable City. 53. Cannato, Ungovernable City. 54. M. A. Farber, “Brooklyn Sit-­In Bars 2d Hearing by School Board,” NYT, Dec. 21, 1966, 1; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door; Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Cannato, Ungovernable City. 55. Farber, “Brooklyn Sit-­In”; Cannato, Ungovernable City; Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013). 56. Cannato, Ungovernable City; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. 57. Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 58. John Kifner, “McGeorge Bundy Dies at 77; Top Advisor in Vietnam Era,” NYT, Sept. 17, 1996, 1.

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59. Ferguson, Top Down, 108. 60. Ferguson, Top Down. 61. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 62. Cannato, Ungovernable City. 63. Carolyn Eisenberg, “The Parents Movement at I.S. 201: From Integration to Black Power, 1956–­66,” PhD diss., Political Science, Columbia University, 1971. 64. Cannato, Ungovernable City. 65. Thomas K. Minter, “Intermediate School 201, Manhattan: Center of Controversy,” Harvard Graduate School of Education, June 2, 1967, UFT Papers, series 2, subseries 2B, box 52; Cannato, Ungovernable City. 66. Jitu Weusi [misspelled Jitur], interview, Aug. 6, 1997, Wilcox Papers, box 1, folder 2. 67. Marta Gutman, “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 186, 191–­92. 68. Sonia Song-­Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 174. 69. Eisenberg, “Parents Movement”; David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System (New York: Random House, 1968), 121. 70. Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, 169. 71. Quoted in Eisenberg, “Parents Movement,” 84; Andrew H. Malcolm, “New Teachers’ Union Is Scored by Board Head,” NYT, June 28, 1971, 34. 72. Eisenberg, “Parents Movement.” 73. Preston Wilcox, “The Controversy over I.S. 201,” Urban Review, July 1966, 12–­16, Wilcox Papers, box 24, folder 1. 74. Wilcox, “Controversy over I.S. 201.” In the late 1990s, Wilcox recalled that his first inclination toward community control came when he and a colleague visited a local principal to request the use of the school after 3:00 p.m. for local youth athletic teams. “The principal said to us that ‘this is our school and we don’t plan to make it available after three o’clock.’ When he said ‘our school,’ that stuck in my mind. How could he say ‘our’ when he didn’t even live in our community?” Preston Wilcox, field interview at IS 201, n.d. (likely ca. 1997), Wilcox Papers, box 1, folder 2. 75. See, for example, Ted Morgan, “War on Poverty Turned into a War on the Poor,” Morning Call, May 27, 2014, https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-xpm-2014-05-27-mcwar-on-poverty-anniversary-lbj-morgan-yv0528-20140527-story.html. 76. Finding aid, Wilcox Papers, http://archives.nypl.org/uploads/collection/pdf_finding_aid/WilcoxPreston.pdf; Wilcox resumé, Wilcox Papers, box 1, folder 1; Patricia Cayo

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Sexton, “East Harlem’s One-­Man Peace Corps,” Harper’s Bazaar, July 1962, in Wilcox Papers, box 18, folder 4. Though a copy of the article galley is included in Wilcox’s papers, I suspect that the piece was never published. 77. See Wilcox’s “Message from the Director” in Preston Wilcox and Marta Valle, “Releasing Human Potential: A Study of East Harlem-­Yorkville School Bus Transfer,” East Harlem Project and New York City Commission on Human Rights, Wilcox Papers, box 25, folder 10. 78. Wilcox and Valle, “Releasing Human Potential”; Leonard Buder, “Yorkville to Get Pupil Shift Today,” NYT, Feb. 1, 1960, 20. 79. Wilcox and Valle, “Releasing Human Potential.” 80. Wilcox and Valle, “Releasing Human Potential.” 81. Preston Wilcox to Harlem Religious Institutions, Dec. 30, 1967, Wilcox Papers, box 5, folder 4; Augustus Trowbridge, Begin with a Dream: How a Private School with a Public Mission Changed the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender in American Education (Xlibris, 2005). 82. Clarence Funnye, “Bundy & Black Power: A Retreat to Reality,” Village Voice, November 16, 1967, UFT Papers, series 2, subseries 2B, box 53, folder 5. 83. Eisenberg, “Parents Movement”; Minter, “Intermediate School 201.” A copy of the leaflet is included in an appendix to Minter’s article. 84. Minter, “Intermediate School 201.” 85. Quoted in Eisenberg, “Parents Movement,” 150–­51. 86. Quoted in Eisenberg, “Parents Movement,” 190. 87. Eisenberg, “Parents Movement.” 88. Eisenberg, “Parents Movement,” 199–­200; Leonard Buder, “Harlem Parents Fight New School,” NYT, Sept. 9, 1966, 47. 89. “‘Black Power’ Moves into Harlem School Boycott,” NYAN, Sept. 24, 1966, 1; Metropolitan Applied Research Center, “Appendix IV,” Fall 1966, Clark Papers, box 322, folder 8. 90. Gerald Grant, “Showpiece of Segregation,” WP, Sept. 25, 1966, A8. 91. Grant, “Showpiece of Segregation.” 92. “‘Black Power’ Moves into Harlem”; Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 93. Grant, “Showpiece of Segregation.” 94. Les Matthews, “1,000 at Meeting of Rump Bd. of Ed,” NYAN, Feb. 4, 1967, 1. 95. “Academic Sickness in New York,” Time, March 24, 1967, 53–­54. 96. Fred M. Hechinger, “The Integration Fight Pays Dividends,” NYT, Sept. 18, 1966, 209. 97. Maia S. Merin, “The Other Community Control: The Two Bridges Demonstration District and the Challenges of School Reform, 1966–­1975,” PhD diss., Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, 2014.

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98. Russell Rickford, “Integration, Black Nationalism, and Radical Democratic Transformation in African American Philosophies of Education, 1965–­74,” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, ed. Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 288–­89. 99. Rickford, “Integration, Black Nationalism,” 294–­95. 100. Rickford, “Integration, Black Nationalism,” 296. Chapter 6 1. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean-­ Hill Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 2. Ferguson, Top Down, 131. 3. Quoted in Ferguson, Top Down, 137. 4. Ferguson, Top Down. 5. NYC Board of Education, “Review of Report of the City Commission on Human Rights, ‘On Three Demonstration Projects in the City Schools,’” BDP, box 14, folder 1. 6. List of OHB Governing Board members, Nov. 3, 1967, BDP, box 17, folder 2; Barbara Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power: The Story Behind the New York City Teachers’ Strike (New York: Citation Press, 1971). 7. Charles S. Isaacs, Inside Ocean Hill–­Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968–­69 (Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press, 2014). In 1968, Ferguson was found guilty by an all-­white jury. When his appeals were exhausted and a sentence was handed down, he fled to Guyana, where he lived for nineteen years before returning to the US in 1989 to contest his conviction, alleging that he had been framed by FBI officials. See Denise Barricklow, “Black Militant Seeks to Overturn Murder-­Conspiracy Conviction,” UPI Archives, April 7, 1989, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/04/07/ Black-militant-seeks-to-overturn-murder-conspiracy-conviction/5803607924800/. 8. Anti-­Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, “Extremists, Violence, and Guns,” June 1968, repr. in Congressional Record, Senate, July 9, 1968, 20270–­73, https://www.govinfo. gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1968-pt15/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1968-pt15-7-1.pdf. Herman Ferguson quote on 20273. 9. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 306. 10. Isaacs, Inside OHB. 11. Annie Stein, “Strategies for Failure,” Harvard Educational Review 41, no. 2 (May 1971): 158–­204.

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12. Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Isaacs, Inside OHB. 13. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 14. John H. Niemeyer et al., “Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Decentralization,” July 1968, Shapiro Papers, Box 1, Folder 4; Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 15. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 277; Ferguson, Top Down. 16. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 279. 17. “School Plan: Brooklyn Test Bogs Down,” NYP, Dec. 4, 1967, BDP, Box 17, Folder 2; Isaacs, Inside OHB. 18. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 286. 19. Les Campbell, interview by Blackside, Inc. for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985, November 3, 1988, HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/ text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=cam5427.0642.028. 20. Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Isaacs, Inside OHB. 21. Quoted in Cannato, Ungovernable City, 310. 22. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 23. Quoted in Maurice J. Goldbloom, “The New York School Crisis,” Commentary, January 1969, repr. in Confrontation at Ocean Hill–­Brownsville, ed. Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittell (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 271. 24. African-­American Teacher’s Association, press release, April 15, 1968, Wilcox Papers, box 24, folder 5. 25. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 26. “Report to Governing Board Ocean Hill School District from Personnel Committee,” Spring 1968, Wilcox Papers, box 24, folder 5. 27. “Report to Governing Board Ocean Hill School District from Personnel Committee.” 28. “Report to Governing Board Ocean Hill School District from Personnel Committee.” 29. Niemeyer et al., “Final Report.” 30. Albert Shanker, interview by Blackside, Inc., for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985, Nov. 15, 1988, HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/ eiiweb/sha5427.0083.150albertshanker.html. 31. Bernard E. Donovan, interview by Melvin I. Urofsky, in Why Teachers Strike: Teachers’ Rights and Community Control, ed. Melvin Urofsky (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 194. Donovan said around eight hundred teachers transfer each year in NYC. 32. Niemeyer et al., “Final Report”; Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 33. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 311.

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34. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 35. Leonard Buder, “3 Schools Closed to Ease Tensions in Brooklyn Area,” NYT, May 16, 1968, 1; Buder, “Lindsay Rebuked in School Dispute,” NYT, May 17, 1968, 1. 36. Niemeyer et al., “Final Report.” 37. Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power, 87. 38. Isaacs, Inside OHB; Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Cannato, Ungovernable City; Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power; Roy Reed, “John Doar, Federal Lawyer on Front Lines against Segregation, Dies at 92,” NYT, Nov. 11, 2014; Charlayne Hunter, “Doar Resigns Post at Restoration Corporation after Six Years,” NYT, Dec. 14, 1973, 39. 39. Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power, 82, 84; Isaacs, Inside OHB; Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Cannato, Ungovernable City. 40. Donovan, interview, Why Teachers Strike, 210. 41. Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 116; Cannato, Ungovernable City; Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power. 42. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 42; Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power, 100. 43. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 46. Black nationalism quote from Charles Isaacs, interview by author, Newburgh, NY, April 23, 2019. 44. Isaacs, Inside OHB. 45. Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 117. 46. Isaacs, Inside OHB; Rhody A. McCoy, interview in Urofsky, Why Teachers Strike, 148. 47. Sol Stern, “‘Scab’ Teachers,” Ramparts, Nov. 17, 1968, 18, UFT Papers, series 2, subseries 2B, box 52, folder 26. 48. Cannato, Ungovernable City, 319; Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 49. UFT Black Caucus press release, Sept. 14, 1968, Parrish Papers, additions 2, box 1, folder 11; Steering Committee of UFT Black Caucus, “Position Paper for Black Caucus,” Nov. 16, 1968, Parrish Papers, additions 2, box 2, folder 1. 50. Richard Parrish, “The New York City Teachers Strikes: Blow to Education, Boon to Racism,” Labor Today, May 1969, in Parrish Papers, additions 2, box 1, folder 20. 51. Parrish, “New York City Teachers Strikes.” 52. Parrish, “New York City Teachers Strikes.” In August 1970, Shanker led a successful effort to have Parrish removed from the UFT’s executive council. According to the Black Caucus, Parrish’s expulsion lent “credence to the concept that when a black challenges white authority, whites generally tend to stick together regardless of the shade of their social, economic or political philosophy.” Parrish was expelled from the UFT’s ruling Unity Caucus in February 1971, as were other union members who had opposed Shanker. Parrish also served as chair of the Black Caucus of the American Federation of Teachers, the national organization representing teachers, from 1970 to 1973. See

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“Convention Report,” Black Caucus News (ca. August 1970), Parrish Papers, additions 2, box 2, folder 1; William K. Stevens, “Shanker’s Foes Call His Rule Autocratic,” NYT, Feb. 24, 1971, 43. 53. Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 54. Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 55. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 70. 56. “Why Don’t They Want Our Children to Learn?”, advertisement, NYT, Sept. 20, 1968, in Clark Papers, box 332, folder 3. 57. Isaacs, Inside OHB; Podair, Strike That Changed New York; Cannato, Ungovernable City. “No intention” quote in Isaacs, Inside OHB, 78. 58. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 80–­81. 59. Isaacs, Inside OHB. As Isaacs notes, a number of historical accounts (including Podair, Ravitch, and Mayer) assert that Superintendent Donovan closed the schools on October 2 to allow tensions to dissipate. In reality, it was the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, and schools were not scheduled to be open that day. In and of itself, this mistake is not damning, but it hints at the ways that public understandings of the OHB dispute were colored by journalistic sourcing depending more heavily on UFT and Board of Ed informants than on individuals on the ground in OHB. 60. In March 1968, a state court had sided with the UFT and CSA over the hiring of demonstration principals. However, the demonstration principals remained in their posts as the Board of Ed appealed the ruling. 61. Carter, Pickets, Parents, and Power. 62. UFT, “Help Preserve Sanity in Our Schools,” advertisement, NYP, Oct. 8, 1968, 41. 63. Lindsay and Nauman quoted in Cannato, Ungovernable City, 325. 64. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 108. 65. Rhody McCoy, interview by Blackside, Inc. for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985, Oct. 12, 1988, HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/ mcc5427.0294.107marc_record_interviewee_process.html. 66. C. Herbert Oliver, interview by Blackside, Inc. for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985, March 13, 1989, HHC, http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/ eiiweb/oli5427.0846.124cherbertoliver.html. 67. United Federation of Teachers, “We Would Rather Teach Than Picket. But We Have No Choice,” advertisement, NYT, Oct. 15, 1968, 51. 68. “We the Teachers of Ocean Hill–­Brownsville Deny That Police Controlled Schools Are ‘Normal,’” statement “signed by the entire teaching staff of Ocean Hill–­Brownsville,” Oct. 16, 1968, Wilcox Papers, box 24, folder 6.

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69. “The Use and Misuse of Power,” Time, Oct. 25, 1968, 52, 58; Isaacs, Inside OHB; Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 202. 70. Isaacs, Inside OHB; Leaflet quoted in Brooklyn Deep, episode 3: “Third Strike,” School Colors podcast, Oct. 4, 2019, https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/episodes/ episode-3-third-strike. Shanker, quoted in Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 108. 71. Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York: Scribner, 1988), 159–­60; Isaacs, Inside OHB; Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York: Henry Holt, 1988); Margalit Fox, “Julius Lester, Chronicler of Black America, Is Dead at 78,” NYT, Jan. 19, 2018. 72. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 185. 73. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 189. 74. Gene Currivan, “Negro Teacher Group’s Editorial Assails Jews,” NYT, Jan. 5, 1969, 43. 75. Quoted in Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 114. 76. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 202. 77. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 88; Martin Mayer, The Teachers Strike: New York, 1968 (New York: Perennial Library, 1969). 78. Robert L. Carter to NYT Sunday Editor, Feb. 6, 1969, in Clark Papers, box 363, folder 4; Roy Reed, “Robert L. Carter, An Architect of School Desegregation, Dies at 94,” NYT, Jan. 3, 2012; Isaacs, Inside OHB. From what I can gather, the Times did not publish Carter’s letter. 79. Podair, Strike That Changed New York. 80. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Welfare Slashed by Republicans in Albany Votes,” NYT, March 30, 1969, 1; Sydney Schanberg, “In New York, The Ax Is Heaviest on Welfare,” NYT, April 6, 1969, E1. 81. Bill Kovach, “Governor Signs Anti-­Busing Bill,” NYT, May 3, 1969, 21. 82. Warren Weaver, Jr., “South’s Senators Seek Busing Ban in Fund Measure,” NYT, Feb. 6, 1970, 1. 83. Monifa Edwards, Brooklyn Five panel presentation, “Ocean Hill Brownsville and Its Relevance Today: The 50th Anniversary of New York City’s Movement for Community Control,” American Educational Research Association, 2018 Annual Meeting, April 16, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWN7opad2DQ. 84. Brooklyn Deep, episode 3: “Third Strike.” “Nerdy” quote from Sonia Cotto-­ Moreno, Brooklyn Five panel presentation. 85. Brooklyn Deep, episode 3: “Third Strike.” NYC student and teacher statistics in

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Christina Collins, “Ethnically Qualified”: Race, Merit, and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920–­1980 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). 86. Veronica Gee, Brooklyn Five panel presentation. 87. Sonia Cotto-­Moreno, Brooklyn Five panel presentation. 88. Cleaster Cotton, Brooklyn Five panel presentation. 89. Monifa Edwards, Brooklyn Five panel presentation. 90. Isaacs, Inside OHB, 262–­63. 91. “Curriculum Changes Planned Quietly in Ocean Hill,” NYT, Sept. 18, 1968, 32. 92. Sonia Song-­Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 93. Russell Rickford, “Black Power as Educational Renaissance: The Harlem Landscape,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 223; Marta Gutman, “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem,” in Erickson and Morrell, Educating Harlem, 183–­209. 94. Zipporiah Mills, video interview by author, Oct. 24, 2020. 95. M. A. Farber, “Calm Prevailing at City Schools,” NYT, June 27, 1969, 44. 96. Tahir H. Butt, “‘You Are Running a de Facto Segregated University’: Racial Segregation and the City University of New York,” in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South, ed. Brian Purnell, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: NYU Press, 2019). As Butt notes, CUNY’s much-­lauded free tuition program did not apply to all students. Students enrolled in evening courses or extension programs for adults paid tuition, as did community college students up until 1965. Black and low-­income students, who were disproportionately enrolled in the community colleges, essentially subsidized free tuition in the senior colleges from which they had been largely excluded. See also Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 97. Biondi, Black Revolution on Campus. On the meaningful changes to the life chances of students admitted during the first years of Open Admissions, see David E. Lavin and David Hyllegard, Changing the Odds: Open Admissions and the Life Chances of the Disadvantaged (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 98. Joshua B. Freeman, Working-­Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001), 233. 99. “Excerpts from the Nyquist Statement,” NYT, Oct. 30, 1972, 25; Murray Schumach, “Mayor Resisting a Canarsie Stand,” NYT, Oct. 29, 1972, 1. 100. Isaacs, interview with author.

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101. Johánna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 102. Brooklyn Deep, episode 3: “Third Strike.” Chapter 7 1. “Kenneth Clark Answers Questions on Plans for Civil Rights Movement,” WNYC Archives, http://www.wnyc.org/story/kenneth-clark-answers-questions-plans-civil -rights-movement/. 2. Clark acknowledged that “within [the ghetto’s] pervasive pathology exists a surprising human resilience. The ghetto is hope, it is despair, it is churches and bars. It is aspiration for change, and it is apathy.” Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 11. Mary Pattillo argues for an expanded conceptualization of ghettos “to include similarly segregated but non-­poor black spaces.” In her view, “racial segregation and subjugation,” rather than poverty, are “the key identifiers of ghettos.” See Mary Pattillo, “Expanding the Boundaries and Definition of the Ghetto,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26, no. 6 (2003): 1047. 3. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 366–­67; Homer Bigart, “3,000 Police Ring Garden as Wallace Stages a Rally,” NYT, Oct. 25, 1968, 1; James T. Wooten, “Alabamian Given Lengthy Ovation,” NYT, Oct. 25, 1968, 32; “Judge Criticizes Melee at Garden,” NYT, Oct. 26, 1968, 20. 4. Steven V. Roberts, “Civil Servants: Wallace Voices Their Frustration,” NYT, Oct. 27, 1968, E6; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-­Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001). 5. Homer Bigart, “2 Killed, 12 Hurt in Violence Here,” NYT, July 25, 1967, 1; Johánna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 6. Expanded versions of the articles were published in book format later that year. Barry Gottehrer, “Foreword,” in New York City in Crisis, ed. Barry Gottehrer (New York: David McKay, 1965), v–­vi. 7. “John Lindsay’s Ten Plagues,” Time, Nov. 1968, 40. 8. Timothy J. Sullivan, New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 106. 9. Richard Reeves, “How Procaccino Could Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory,” NYT, July 20, 1969, E6; Ed Kilgore, “How the 1969 Mayoral Primary Changed New York City Politics,” New York, June 17, 2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/50-yearsago-new-york-held-a-mayoral-primary-for-the-ages.html. 10. Steve Fraser, The Limousine Liberal (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Ironically,

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this political creature was calling not for a continuation of the status quo from which he had benefited greatly but for upending many of the existing policies, customs, and moral values on which America had been built. Javits quote in “John Lindsay’s Ten Plagues.” 11. Tom Buckley, “What Is a Mario Procaccino?” NYT Sunday Magazine, Aug. 10, 1969, SM7; “New York: The Revolt of the Average Man,” Time, Oct. 3, 1969, 17. 12. Buckley, “What Is a Mario Procaccino?” 13. Sidney E. Zion, “Procaccino Pledges a Safe and Sane City,” NYT, May 13, 1969, 37. 14. “3 Mayoral Candidates ‘Greeted’ in Harlem,” NYAN, Nov. 1, 1969, 1. 15. George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire—­Part II (documentary), American Experience, season 12, episode 13, dir. Daniel McCabe and Paul Stekler (Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service, 2000), YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bMva835Hd9I. Clip is located around the 11:30 mark. 16. Maria C. Lizzi, “‘My Heart Is as Black as Yours’: White Backlash, Racial Identity, and Italian American Stereotypes in New York City’s 1969 Mayoral Campaign,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 43–­80. 17. Homer Bigart, “Politics: Procaccino Is Booed by Harlem Crowd,” NYT, Oct. 25, 1969, 18. 18. Kilgore, “1969 Mayoral Primary.” 19. Robert D. McFadden, “John V. Lindsay, Mayor and Maverick, Dies at 79,” NYT, Dec. 21, 2000. 20. Warren Weaver Jr., “Ribicoff Attacks Schools in North; Supports Stennis,” NYT, Feb. 10, 1970, 1. 21. Joseph Crespino, “The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: The Stennis Amendment and the Fracturing of Liberal School Desegregation Policy, 1964–­1972,” Journal of Policy History 18, no. 3 (2006): 304. 22. Arlen J. Large, “Senate Votes Equal Use in North, South of Integration Guidelines,” WSJ, Feb. 19, 1970, 6. 23. Abraham A. Ribicoff, “Excerpts from Ribicoff Rights Speech,” NYT, Feb. 10, 1970, 29. 24. Abraham Ribicoff, America Can Make It! (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 24. 25. Preston Wilcox, “On the Way to School-­Community Control: Some Observations,” Feb. 20, 1970, Wilcox Papers, box 24, folder 1. 26. Ribicoff, America Can Make It!, 30. 27. Gary Orfield, “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton (New York: New Press, 1996), 291–­330; James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 105.

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28. Weaver, “Ribicoff Attacks Schools in North.” 29. On federal efforts at suburban desegregation, see Christopher Bonastia, Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 30. Dan Oberdorfer, “Stennis ‘Concept’ Backed,” WP, February 13, 1970, A1. 31. Peter Milius, “Even the Courts Are Now Wavering on Desegregation,” WP, March 11, 1970, A2; Crespino, “Best Defense.” 32. Crespino, “Best Defense.” 33. David E. Rosenbaum, “Ribicoff Files Bill to Integrate Suburbs,” Washington Evening Star, March 17, 1971, A11. 34. Spencer Rich, “South Challenged in Integration Plan,” WP, April 29, 1971, A2. 35. Clarence Mitchell, “Statement of NAACP on the Ribicoff Amendment,” Congressional Record 117, no. 9, April 21, 1971, 11326, https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPOCRECB-1971-pt9/GPO-CRECB-1971-pt9-5-2; David E. Rosenbaum, “Stennis School Plan Is Backed by Senate,” NYT, April 23, 1971, 1. 36. David E. Rosenbaum, “Javits Accused by Ribicoff of ‘Hypocrisy’ on Schools,” NYT, April 21, 1971, 1. 37. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Senate debate on Emergency School Aid and Quality Integrated Education Act of 1971, Congressional Record 117, no. 9, April 20, 1971, 10959, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1971-pt9/pdf/GPO-CRECB1971-pt9-1-1.pdf. 38. Robert Waters, “Integration Said ‘Unrealistic,’” newspaper clipping (origin unknown) in Ribicoff Papers, box 575, folder “Education-­S egregation/News Stories 1970–­1971”; David K. Shipler, “Lindsay Backs School Consolidation,” NYT, March 17, 1972, in Ribicoff Papers, box 576, folder “Education-­Segregation/Response to Legislation 1972.” 39. David K. Shipler, “Busing in New York: Ambivalence, Not Outrage,” NYT, March 20, 1972, 39. 40. David E. Rosenbaum, “Senate Bars Ribicoff Plan for Integration of Schools,” NYT, April 22, 1971, 1; Nick Thimmesch,“Abe Ribicoff ’s Crusade,” Los Angeles Times Syndicate, May 11, 1971, Ribicoff Papers, box 576, folder “Education-­Segregation/Response to Legislation 1971”; Robert Waters, “Senate Defeats Integration Plan,” Hartford Courant, March 1, 1972, 2. 41. Senator Jacob Javits, Senate debate on Emergency School Aid and Quality Integrated Education Act of 1971, Congressional Record 117, no. 9, April 21, 1971, 11322, https:// www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-­CRECB-­1971-­pt9/pdf/GPO-­CRECB-­1971-­pt9-­2-­2. pdf 42. Emergency Ad Hoc Committee of Parents for Community Control, “Guidelines

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for Getting Your School Open Now,” Oct. 18, 1968, UFT Papers, series 2, subseries 2B, box 52, folder 21. 43. Senator Robert Taft, Senate debate on Emergency School Aid and Quality Integrated Education Act of 1971, Congressional Record 117, no. 9, April 21, 1971, 11329, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1971-pt9/pdf/GPO-CRECB1971-pt9-2-2.pdf. The call for community control was also adopted by whites in some neighborhoods who objected to Black students from other neighborhoods being bused into their local schools. See Gene I. Maeroff, “Canarsie Dispute and the Law,” NYT, October 31, 1972, 32. 44. Edward B. Fiske, “Community-­Run Schools Leave Hopes Unfulfilled,” NYT, June 24, 1980, A1. 45. David K. Shipler, “To Be Black and Poor Is to Be Not Wanted,” NYT, Nov. 21, 1971, E7. 46. Nathan Glazer, “When the Melting Pot Doesn’t Melt,” NYT Sunday Magazine, Jan. 2, 1972, SM12. 47. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 48. On pragmatism in Black educational activism, see Russell Rickford, “Integration, Black Nationalism, and Radical Democratic Transformation in African American Philosophies of Education, 1965–­74,” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, ed. Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 49. George Goodman Jr., “On Many Issues, Tilden Residents Fight ‘System That Ignores Us,’” NYT, Oct. 29, 1972, 67. 50. Leonard Buder, “The Issues,” NYT, Oct. 1, 1972, 111. 51. The basic chronology of the District 18–­Tilden Houses dispute draws from Kenneth B. Clark et al., “Analysis of the Decision and Order of the New York City Board of Education,” MARC Staff Paper, April 18, 1973, Clark Papers, box 395, folder 6. On arrests of Tilden parents, see Buder, “The Issues.” 52. Harvey B. Scribner, statement regarding the integration dispute in Community School District 18, Brooklyn, Clark Papers, box 381, folder 3. 53. Leonard Buder, “Scribner Is Cast in a New Role,” NYT, Oct. 25, 1972, 24; Joseph Lelyveld, “The Most Powerful Man in the School System—­On Paper,” NYT Sunday Magazine, March 21, 1971, SM30. 54. Lelyveld, “Most Powerful Man.” 55. Leonard Buder, “Board Reverses Scribner, Orders 32 into J.H.S. 211,” NYT, Oct. 27, 1972, 85. 56. Board of Education of the City of New York, “In the Matter of the Appeals from

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the Orders of the Chancellor Pertaining to Community School Board No. 18,” Clark Papers, box 381, folder 3; Buder, “Board Reverses Scribner.” 57. Quoted in Iver Peterson, “A Lesson for the Children: Hate!” NYT, Oct. 29, 1972, E11. 58. “Excerpts from the Nyquist Statement,” NYT, Oct. 30, 1972, 25; Murray Schumach, “Mayor Resisting a Canarsie Stand,” NYT, Oct. 29, 1972, 1. 59. Thirty-­two Tilden students had been assigned to JHS 211, but three did not attend during these first days of entry into the school. 60. Leonard Buder, “Eggs and Rocks Thrown as Boycott at Canarsie School Continues,” NYT, Nov. 1, 1972, 93; “Hate Grows in Brooklyn,” Time, Nov. 13, 1972, 88. 61. Community School Board District 18 Zoning Plan, Jan. 12, 1973, Clark Papers, box 381, folder 3. 62. Bernard Bard, “The Canarsie Compromise,” NYP, April 2, 1973, 2. 63. Clark et al., “Analysis of the Decision and Order”; Leonard Buder, “Clark for Ouster of School Board,” NYT, May 17, 1973, 39. 64. Gene I. Maeroff, “Lachman Rebuts Criticism of Board,” NYT, July 6, 1973, 27; Bernard Bard, “Clark: Probe Ed Board’s Payroll,” NYP, July 5, 1973, 2; “Clark Asks City and State to Probe Bd. of Ed.” NYAN, July 12, 1973, 1. 65. Bernard Bard, “Ask Probe of Clark’s ‘Moonlight’ Earnings,” NYP, July 12, 1973, 3. 66. Roy Wilkins to New York State Regents, Oct. 9, 1973, Clark Papers, box 395, folder 5. 67. Leonard Buder, “Court Ousts Nine on School Board,” NYT, Sept. 12, 1973, 38; “Accord at P.S. 251 Ends Boycott on Tilden Pupils,” NYT, Sept. 22, 1973, 35. 68. Quoted in Daniel Matlin, On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 114–­15. 69. Boyce Rensberger, “Kenneth Clark Asks New Drugs to Curb Hostility of Leaders,” NYT, Sept. 5, 1971, 1. 70. Boyce Rensberger, “Clark Disputed on Peace Drugs,” NYT, Sept. 7, 1971, 21. 71. Matlin, On the Corner, 116. 72. Kenneth B. Clark, “A Fail-­Safe Plan,” Newsweek, March 19, 1973. 73. Nick Juravich, “‘Harlem Sophistication’: Community-­Based Paraprofessional Educators in Central Harlem and East Harlem” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 237. According to Juravich, in fall 1963, Parrish “recruited two hundred teachers to work with students alongside four hundred mothers hired by HARYOU [Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited].” HARYOU, a youth services program, was founded by Kenneth Clark and his Northside Center associates in 1962, funded by the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. In 1964, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. engaged in a hostile takeover of the organization, merging it with

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the competing Associated Community Teens to form HARYOU-­ACT. See also Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). 74. Juravich, “‘Harlem Sophistication.’” 75. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 127. 76. Juravich, “‘Harlem Sophistication’”; Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal. 77. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 132. 78. Juravich, “‘Harlem Sophistication’”; Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 79. Sonia Song-­Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 231. 80. Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement; Perrillo, Uncivil Rights, 158. 81. Kim Phillips-­Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 220–­21. See also Kim Phillips-­Fein and Esther Cyna, “Harlem Schools in the Fiscal Crisis” in Erickson and Morrell, Educating Harlem. 82. Phillips-­Fein, Fear City, 130. 83. Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 123. 84. Phillips-­Fein and Cyna, “Harlem Schools,” 272. The authors observe that the wavering faith in public schools during this time laid the path for charter schools. 85. Ryan, Five Miles Away, 98. Interestingly in the decision, Justice Lewis Powell wrote a separate opinion arguing for the erasure of the de facto/de jure distinction. 86. For an analysis of the Keyes case, see, for example, Danielle R. Olden, “Becoming Minority: Mexican Americans, Race, and the Legal Struggle for Educational Equity in Denver, Colorado,” Western Historical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 43–­66. 87. Irving Anker (chancellor of the New York City Board of Education), testimony before the New York City Commission on Human Rights, May 16, 1974 (Brooklyn: NYC Board of Education), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED110561.pdf. By the 1976–­77 school year, if every public school in Brooklyn had matched the borough’s ethnic school population, each school would have been 28 percent white; in the Bronx, 15 percent; in Manhattan, 12 percent; in Queens, 48 percent; and in Staten Island, 83 percent. See Lesley Oelsner, “Goal of Integration in Schools Elusive,” NYT, Nov. 20, 1977, 1. 88. Anker, testimony. Quotes on pages 8 and 10. 89. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, “Introduction: The End of Southern History,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7.

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90. Orfield, “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation.” On metropolitan-­level approaches to segregation, see Bonastia, Knocking on the Door. 91. Leonard Buder, “U.S. Seeks Cooperation of Schools in Bias Inquiry,” NYT, Dec. 23, 1975, 17. 92. Edward C. Burks, “H.E.W. Withholds School Funds for New York over Rights Issue,” NYT, July 6, 1977, 46. 93. Burks, “H.E.W. Withholds School Funds.” 94. Martin H. Gerry, director, Office for Civil Rights, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, statement, January 18, 1977 (Washington, DC: Office for Civil Rights), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED135888.pdf. 95. Martin H. Gerry to Chancellor Irving Anker, January 18, 1977. The letter is included in Gerry’s statement in note 94. 96. Max H. Siegel, “Teacher Assignment by Race Overruled,” NYT, March 8, 1978, A1. 97. Michael A. Rebell and Arthur R. Block, Equality and Education: Federal Civil Rights Enforcement in the New York City School System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). This book is the most comprehensive account of HEW’s investigation into the New York City school system. 98. Oelsner, “Goal of Integration”, 1; Kierna Mayo, “Independents’ Day,” City Limits, Jan. 1, 1997, https://citylimits.org/1997/01/01/independents-day/. 99. Brittney Lewer, “Pursuing ‘Real Power to Parents’: Babette Edwards’s Activism from Community Control to Charter Schools,” in Educating Harlem, 278. On ideological flexibility in the Black community, see Rickford, “Integration, Black Nationalism.” 100. Leonard Buder, “Nyquist Rescinds His 1975 Order to Integrate 5 Schools in Brooklyn,” NYT, Jan. 18, 1977, 31. 101. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 85. 102. Rieder, Canarsie, 216. 103. Rieder, Canarsie, 200. 104. Laurie Goodstein, “In Canarsie, Change Cuts on the Bias,” WP, August 9, 1991, A12. 105. Robert D. McFadden, “Taunts and Outrage Greet Protest March in Canarsie,” NYT, Aug. 11, 1991, 35; James C. McKinley Jr., “Dinkins Tries to Ease Tensions from Canarsie Bias Incidents,” NYT, Aug. 8, 1991, B6. Chapter 8 1. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 489. 2. Peter Blauner, “The Voice of New York: An Oral History of Our Times,” New York, April 11, 1988, 63.

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3. Kim Phillips-­Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 40. 4. Frederick Shaw, “The Educational Park in New York: Archetype of the School of the Future?” Phi Delta Kappan 50, no. 6 (Feb. 1969): 329–­31; Paul D. Naish, “Fantasia Bronxiana: Freedomland and Co-­op City,” New York History 82, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 259–­85. 5. Leonard Buder, “First Unit in ‘Educational Park’ System to Open Monday,” NYT, Sept. 11, 1971, 29. 6. Buder, “First Unit.” 7. Leonard Buder, “City Schools Open Today with Rolls Down Again a Bit,” NYT, Sept. 10, 1973, 1. 8. Ari L. Goldman, “High Schools Begin amid Hope, But Others Face Boycott Today,” NYT, Sept. 8, 1977, 57. 9. “Construction Flaws Hamper Bronx School Complex,” NYT, Nov. 20, 1977, 64. 10. Goldman, “High Schools Begin amid Hope.” 11. August Gold, “The Resurgence of the Small School in the City,” Phi Delta Kappan, Jan. 1975, 313. 12. Gold, “Resurgence of the Small School,” 314, 315. 13. See the skepticism expressed by the United Parents Association and the sociologist Robert Dentler in chapter 5. 14. For example, Christopher Jencks’s widely discussed research found that “well-­ financed schools do not make much difference to students’ long-­run cognitive development or adult success” and that there exists “no convincing evidence that racial desegregation affects [Black or white] students’ eventual educational attainment one way or another.” Heather Lewis, New York City Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and Its Legacy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013); Christopher Jencks, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 24, 155. 15. On racial conflicts in the 1980s and ’90s, see, for example, Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of New York (New York: Norton, 1990); Wilbur C. Rich, “Racial Events, Diplomacy, and Dinkins’s Image,” in Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era, ed. Clarence Taylor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 182–­203; Jerald Podair, “‘One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani’s New York,” in Taylor, Civil Rights in New York City, 204–­18. 16. Lewis, New York City Schools. 17. Lewis, New York City Schools. 18. Diane Ravitch, “A History of Public School Governance in New York City,” in When Mayors Take Charge: School Governance in the City, ed. Joseph P. Viteritti (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 171–­86; Clara Hemphill, “Parent Power

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and Mayoral Control: Parent and Community Involvement in New York City Schools,” in When Mayors Take Charge, 194. 19. Nicole Mader, Clara Hemphill, and Qasim Abbas, The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools, Center for New York City Affairs, New School, May 2018, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/ t/5aecb1c3352f537d3541623b/1525461450469/The+Paradox+of+Choice.pdf. 20. Matt Barnum, “Michael Bloomberg Is Running for President on His Education Record. Here’s What Research Found about These Policies,” Chalkbeat, Feb. 25, 2020, https:// www.chalkbeat.org/2020/2/25/21178652/michael-bloomberg-is-running-for-presidenton-his-education-record-here-s-what-research-found-about. 21. Dana Goldstein, “New York’s Schools Chancellor Is Talking about Integration. Can He Make It Happen?” NYT, Sept. 3, 2018. 22. Zipporiah Mills, video interview by author, Oct. 24, 2020. My son attended PS 261. 23. Mary Pattillo’s study of school choice in Chicago found that many poor and working-­class Black parents believed their children’s potential school assignments were constrained by admissions screening and geographical access, among other factors, forcing them to select from a list of unappealing options, such as their underachieving neighborhood high school. Mary Pattillo, “Everyday Politics of School Choice in the Black Community,” Du Bois Review 12, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 41–­7 1. 24. New York City Department of Education, 2019 NYC High School Directory, https://bigappleacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/HSD_2019_ENGLISH_ Web.pdf; Elizabeth A. Harris and Ford Fessenden, “The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools,” NYT, May 5, 2017. Beginning with 2020 high school admissions, hard copies of the directory included only general information about admissions, directing students to an online portal for individual school data. See Reema Amin, “City High School Directory Takes Virtual Turn,” The City, May 22, 2019, https://www.thecity.nyc/education/2019/5/22/21211050/city-public-high-school -directory-takes-virtual-turn. 25. Harris and Fessenden, “Broken Promises.” 26. Civil Rights Project, “New York Schools Most Segregated in the Nation,” press release, March 26, 2014, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014press-releases/new-york-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation/CRPRelease_NY-v6.pdf. 27. By 2018, charters accounted for 12 percent of these students. Civil Rights Project, “New York Schools Most Segregated”; John Kucsera with Gary Orfield, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future, Civil Rights Project, March 2014, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/ integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-ExtremeSegregation-2014.pdf; Danielle Cohen, NYC School Segregation: A Report Card from the

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UCLA Civil Rights Project, June 2021, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k12-education/integration-and-diversity/nyc-school-segregation-report-card-still-lastaction-needed-now/NYC_6-09-final-for-post.pdf. 28. Kucsera, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation, table 22. In 2018–­19, the NYC public school population was 40.6 percent Latino, 25.1 percent Black, 16.6 percent Asian, and 15.1 percent white. Cohen, NYC School Segregation. 29. Nyah Berg (Integrated Schools project director, New York Appleseed), video interview by author, July 31, 2020. Berg referred specifically to the assignment of students to PS 133 in Park Slope (Brooklyn), which is described later in this chapter. 30. Thomas Kaplan, “De Blasio’s Tale of 2 New Yorks Inspires Liberals Beyond City,” NYT, Dec. 20, 2013. 31. Ethan Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep in a School Desegregation Conversation—­How Did We Get Here?” Gotham Gazette, Sept. 3, 2019, https://www. gothamgazette.com/city/8769-new-york-city-waist-deep-school-desegregation-conversation-how-did-we-get-here-de-blasio; Christina Veiga and Philissa Cramer, “Placing Limits on Their Integration Push, Carranza and de Blasio Say Busing Is off the Table,” Chalkbeat New York, Sept. 5, 2018, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2018/9/5/21105643/placinglimits-on-their-integration-push-carranza-and-de-blasio-say-busing-is-off-the-table. 32. Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep.” 33. New York State Education Department, “NYC Geog Dist #15—­Brooklyn Enrollment (2018–­19),” https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2019&instid=800000045191. 34. InsideSchools profiles of PS 191, https://insideschools.org/school/03M191, and PS 199, https://insideschools.org/school/03M199. 35. Gail Robinson, “Policies Shift, Neighborhoods Change, But Elementary School Segregation Holds On,” City Limits, March 28, 2017, https://citylimits.org/2017/03/28/ policies-shift-neighborhoods-change-but-elementary-school-segregation-holds-on/. 36. Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep.” The four districts were 1, 3, 13, and 15. 37. Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep.” 38. Patrick Wall, “De Blasio: City Must Respect Families’ Investments amid School Diversity Debates,” Chalkbeat New York, Nov. 6, 2015, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/11/6/21092428/ de-blasio-city-must-respect-families-investments-amid-school-diversity-debates. 39. Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep.” 40. “‘Controlled Choice’ for Integrating Schools: What It’s All About,” WNYC, June 6, 2016, https://www.wnyc.org/story/controlled-choice-public-schools-explainer/. 41. National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD), Federal Support for School Integration: An Obama Administration Overview, Issue Brief 8, Jan. 2017, https://school-diversity. org/pdf/DiversityIssueBriefNo8.pdf.

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42. Quoted in NCSD, Federal Support for School Integration, 1. The text of the Supreme Court decision is located at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-908.pdf. 43. Quoted in NCSD, Federal Support for School Integration, 2. Nyah Berg noted that the release of the Obama guidelines was another spark to the recent school integration movement in New York City. Berg, video interview. 44. Kalyn Belsha, “Dozens of School Districts Applied to an Obama-­Era Integration Program before Trump Officials Axed It,” Chalkbeat, Dec. 2, 2019, https://www.chalkbeat. org/2019/12/2/21121866/dozens-of-school-districts-applied-to-an-obama-era-integrationprogram-before-trump-officials-axed-i. 45. “Sarah Medina Camiscoli,” Fearless Communicators, https://www.fearlesscommunicators.com/sarah-camiscolli/. 46. Integrate NYC Executive Council (Adult Executive Director Sarah “Zaps” Zapiler, Executive High School Director Leanne Nunes, and Executive College Director Julisa Perez Gomez), video interview by author, May 20, 2020. 47. Zapiler, Integrate NYC interview. 48. InsideSchools, Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences, https://insideschools.org/school/22K535. 49. Gomez, Integrate NYC interview. 50. Taylor McGraw (executive director of The Bell), video interview by author, July 22, 2020. The Bell advises Teens Take Charge and produces the Miseducation podcast, https://www.bellvoices.org/podcast. 51. Teens Take Charge members Nelson Luna (co-­founder), Whitney Stephenson (co-­founder), Stephanie Pacheco (growth), Carmen Lopez Villamil (organizer), Jorge Morales (alumni advisor/mentor), Coco Rhum (alumni advisor/mentor), video interview by author, June 22, 2020. 52. SEO (Seizing Every Opportunity), https://www.seo-usa.org/. 53. Hebh Jamal, “To Whom It Should Concern,” Teens Take Charge, April 28, 2017, https://www.teenstakecharge.com/testimony-1/2017/5/19/hebh-jamal. 54. Haby Sando, “To Whom It Should Concern,” Teens Take Charge, April 28, 2017, https://www.teenstakecharge.com/testimony-1/2017/5/19/haby-sondo. Excerpts from these and other spoken-­word stories from the event are published in Adeel Hassan, “‘To Whom It Should Concern,’” NYT, May 21, 2017. 55. Morales, Teens Take Charge interview by author. 56. Pacheco, Teens Take Charge interview by author. Demographic information on Pacheco’s school, the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, at https://insideschools.org/school/04M435. 57. Morales, Teens Take Charge interview by author; Kate Phillippo, A Contest without Winners: How Students Experience Competitive School Choice (Minneapolis: University

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of Minnesota Press, 2019). In her study of school-­choice policies in Chicago, Phillippo finds that high-­school applicants paid a similar psychic toll when they were not admitted to the schools they desired to attend. 58. Teens Take Charge vs. New York City Department of Education, Complaint Pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nov. 16, 2020, https://static1.squarespace. com/static/58f94bd2579fb3435961c3f5/t/5fb5349a0854774b8820dcb1/1605711024496/Tee ns+Take+Charge+vs.+NYCDOE+Complaint.pdf. 59. NYC Department of Education, “School Diversity Advisory Group,” https://www. schools.nyc.gov/about-us/vision-and-mission/diversity-in-our-schools/school-diversityadvisory-group. Amy Hsin (Queens College), Hazel Dukes (NAACP), Jose Calderon (Hispanic Federation), Maya Wiley (New School), and Richard Kahlenberg (Century Foundation) serve as the five-­member executive committee. Calderon, Dukes, and Wiley are co-­chairs of the full panel. 60. William Neuman and Elizabeth A. Harris, “Trying Again, de Blasio Names a New Schools Chancellor,” NYT, March 5, 2018; Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep.” 61. Chancellor Richard A. Carranza, remarks, Association for a Better New York breakfast, Sept. 14, 2018, https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/news/announcements/ contentdetails/2018/09/14/chancellor-richard-a.-carranza-s-remarks-at-the-associationfor-a-better-new-york-breakfast. 62. IntegrateNYC, “Real Integration,” https://www.integratenyc.org/realintegration. 63. School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), Making the Grade: The Path to Real Integration and Equity for NYC Public School Students, Feb. 2019, https://docs.wixstatic. com/ugd/1c478c_4de7a85cae884c53a8d48750e0858172.pdf. 64. Eliza Shapiro, “A Few More Black Students Are Offered Spots at Stuyvesant, Fanning Fresh Uproar,” NYT, April 10, 2019; Eliza Shapiro and Vivian Wang, “Amid Racial Divisions, Mayor’s Plan to Scrap Elite School Exam Fails,” NYT, June 24, 2019. The city did implement a Discovery plan that allows low-­income students who narrowly missed the exam cutoff scores to enroll in summer courses to prepare for the specialized schools. Early data suggests that the program will not have substantial impacts on the enrollment of Black and Latino students in these schools. 65. David Cantor, “74 Analysis Shows Girls Already Outperform Boys at NYC’s Elite Schools amid Fears That Opening Up Admissions Would Water Down Quality,” The 74 Million, June 12, 2018, https://www.the74million.org/article/nyc-specialized-schools-girlsboys/. In 2018, girls represented 42 percent of the 15,000-­plus students in specialized high schools. On average, they outperform boys in these schools. 66. Shapiro and Wang, “Mayor’s Plan to Scrap Elite School Exam Fails.” 67. Samantha Handler, “‘We’re Moving Now’: City Pursues School Desegregation

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Measures, with Major Looming Test,” Gotham Gazette, June 28, 2019, https://www. gothamgazette.com/city/8644-we-re-moving-now-city-pursues-school-desegregation-measures-with-major-looming-test; NYC Department of Education (DOE), “School Diversity Advisory Group [SDAG] Recommendations,” https://www. schools.nyc.gov/about-us/vision-and-mission/diversity-in-our-schools/ school-diversity-advisory-group-recommendations. 68. SDAG, Making the Grade; DOE, “SDAG Recommendations.” 69. DOE, “SDAG Recommendations”; Reema Amin and Amy Zimmer, “Find Out How Much Your School’s PTA Raises (or Doesn’t),” Chalkbeat New York, Dec. 2, 2019, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/12/2/21113658/find-out-how-much-your-school-s-pta -raises-or-doesn-t. 70. In response to demands that the city substantially reduce funding for the New York Police Department (NYPD), Mayor de Blasio said he would cut $300 million from the NYPD by removing school safety agents from the department’s purview. However, city budget documents revealed that school safety agents would remain as NYPD employees for the upcoming budget year and that said cuts would not be made. See Joe Anuta, “School Safety Agents Will Stay under NYPD This Year, Despite City’s Claims of $1B Cut,” Politico, July 2, 2020, https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/07/02/schoolsafety-agents-will-stay-under-nypd-this-year-despite-citys-claims-of-1b-cut-1296868. 71. DOE, “SDAG Recommendations.” 72. Zapiler, Integrate NYC interview by author. 73. Berg, interview. 74. Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye, testimony before the New York City Council, May 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O2AKiVmQek. 75. “NYC Teens Stage Sit-­In at City Hall to Protest ‘Segregation Crisis’ at Public High Schools,” PIX11, June 27, 2019, https://pix11.com/2019/06/27/nyc-teens-stage-sit-in-at-cityhall-to-protest-segregation-crisis-at-public-high-schools/; Alston quote in Eliza Shapiro, “Desegregating N.Y. Schools Was His Top Priority. What Happened?” NYT, Aug. 23, 2019. 76. Bob McManus, “Racial Division Is Richard Carranza’s Only Agenda,” NYP, June 4, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/06/04/racial-division-is-richard-carranzas-only-agenda/. 77. Handler, “‘We’re Moving Now.’” 78. Shapiro, “Desegregating N.Y. Schools.” 79. Shapiro, “Desegregating N.Y. Schools”; Christina Veiga, “An Integration Plan Is Approved for Upper West Side and Harlem Middle Schools,” Chalkbeat New York, June 20, 2018, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2018/6/20/21105200/an-integration-plan -is-approved-for-upper-west-side-and-harlem-middle-schools. 80. Eliza Shapiro, “Desegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York,” NYT, Aug. 26, 2019; School Diversity Advisory Group, “Letter from the Executive

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Committee” in Making the Grade II: New Programs for Better Schools, Aug. 2019, 7, https:// docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_1d5659bd05494f6d8cb2bbf03fcc95dd.pdf. 81. Coco Rhum, Teens Take Charge interview by author. 82. City Hall Press Office, “State of the City 2020: Mayor de Blasio Unveils Blueprint to Save Our City,” Feb. 6, 2020, https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/064-20/ state-the-city-2020-mayor-de-blasio-blueprint-save-our-city#/0; Ethan Geringer-Sameth, “Pandemic Reinforces De Blasio’s Inaction on School Desegregation Recommendations,” Gotham Gazette, May 22, 2020, https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/9409-pandemicreinforces-de-blasio-inaction-school-desegregation-recommendations. 83. Matt Gonzales, video interview by author, June 5, 2020. Gonzales’s bio is at https:// steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/matt-gonzales. 84. McGraw, interview. 85. Zarith Pineda, Brown @ 66: The State of Integration in NYC, presentation at virtual conference coordinated by IntegrateNYC, Teens Take Charge, CACF, New York Appleseed, NYU Metro Center, and Territorial Empathy, May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=JDNm1moyOA0&feature=youtu.be; Geringer-Sameth, “New York City Is Waist-­Deep.” 86. Laura Meckler, “What Happened When Brooklyn Tried to Integrate Its Middle Schools,” WP, Nov. 15, 2019; Christina Veiga, “With a Bold School Integration Plan in Place, Brooklyn Parents Begin to Sweat the Details,” Chalkbeat New York, Sept. 24, 2018, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2018/9/24/21105733/with-a-bold-school-integration-plan-inplace-brooklyn-parents-begin-to-sweat-the-details. 87. Teens Take Charge vs. New York City Department of Education. 88. Pineda, Brown @ 66. 89. City Council member Brad Lander, email response to author questions, Aug. 18, 2020. 90. Jesse Margolis, Daniel Dench, and Shirin Hashim, The Impact of Middle School Integration Efforts on Segregation in Two New York City Schools Districts, MarGrady Research, July 2020, http://margrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-Impactof-Middle-School-Integration-Efforts-on-Segregation-in-Two-New-York-City-Districts.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1Q3z5IXtcMSeb9kkhorVQZ81cV6x8O-T6n9z5kk6awg0FWjiRT W0J0tIA. 91. Meghan Gallagher, “The View Inside NYC’s Latest School Segregation Protest,” The 74 Million, Nov. 18, 2019, https://www.the74million.org/the-view-inside-nycs-latestschool-segregation-protest-why-students-walked-out-monday-for-1800-seconds-andsay-theyll-do-it-again-every-week-until-de-blasio-acts/. 92. Zapiler, Integrate NYC interview by author. 93. Carmen Lopez Villamil, Teens Take Charge interview by author.

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94. Jim Dwyer, “New York’s Playing Fields Aren’t Level, Students Say,” NYT, June 28, 2018. 95. Taylor Swaak, “After 7 School Integration Strikes, NYC Students Get Rare Public Meeting with Ed Department Officials, Asking ‘How Much Longer Will We Have to Wait?’” The 74 Million, Feb. 3, 2020, https://www.the74million.org/article/after-7-schoolintegration-strikes-nyc-students-get-rare-public-meeting-with-ed-department-officialsasking-how-much-longer-will-we-have-to-wait/. 96. Swaak, “After 7 School Integration Strikes”; Reema Amin, “NYC Has the Most Diverse Teaching Force in the State. But It Still Doesn’t Match the Student Body,” Chalkbeat New York, Nov. 5, 2019, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/11/5/21109162/nyc-has-the-mostdiverse-teaching-force-in-the-state-but-it-still-doesn-t-match-the-student-body. As of 2016–­17, 80 percent of NYC students were Black, Hispanic, or Asian, whereas 28 percent of instructors were people of color. 97. Taylor Swaak, “NYC Student Activists Can’t Boycott Schools That Are Closed, but as Coronavirus Highlights Longstanding Inequities, a Chance to Change Policy Emerges,” The 74 Million, March 23, 2020, https://www.the74million.org/article/nyc-student-activists-cant-boycott-schools-that-are-closed-but-as-coronavirus-highlights-long-standinginequities-a-chance-to-change-policy-emerges/. 98. Leanne Nunes, Integrate NYC interview. 99. Nelson Luna, Teens Take Charge interview by author. 100. Zapiler, Integrate NYC interview. 101. Integrate NYC interview. 102. See https://www.nyappleseed.org/ and https://www.nycasid.com/. 103. Amy Zimmer, Christina Veiga, and Reema Amin, “Carranza to Step Down Mid-­ Pandemic after 3 Years at Helm of New York City Schools,” Chalkbeat New York, Feb. 26, 2021, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/26/22302822/chancellor-richard-carranza-resigns -meisha-porter. 104. Zapiler, Integrate NYC interview by author. Chapter 9 1. Mary Pattillo, “The Problem of Integration,” in The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity in the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Ingrid Gould Ellen and Justin Peter Steil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 30–­31. 2. Leanne Nunes, Integrate NYC executive high school director, video interview by author, May 20, 2020. 3. InsideSchools, High School of American Studies at Lehman College, https://insideschools.org/school/10X696; Lehman College Institutional Research, Planning & Data Analytics, “Interactive Fact Book: Enrollment Snapshot,” http://www.lehman.edu/ institutional-research/interactive-factbook.php; US Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: Bronx

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County (Bronx Borough), New York,” July 1, 2019 population estimates, https://www. census.gov/quickfacts/bronxcountybronxboroughnewyork. 4. Danielle Johnson and ASAP youth leader, presentations, Brown @ 66: The State of Integration in NYC, virtual conference coordinated by IntegrateNYC, Teens Take Charge, CACF, New York Appleseed, NYU Metro Center, and Territorial Empathy, May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDNm1moyOA0&feature=youtu.be. 5. On Twitter, the Screened Students Against Screens Coalition (@SSASCoalition) provides testimony from students in screened schools calling for an end to discriminatory admissions screens, and Black and Brown at Stuy (@blackbrownstuy) shares personal experiences with deep-­seated racism at Stuyvesant High. 6. Coco Rhum, Teens Take Charge interview by author. 7. School Diversity Advisory Group, “Letter from the Executive Committee” in Making the Grade II: New Programs for Better Schools, Aug. 2019, 7, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ ugd/1c478c_1d5659bd05494f6d8cb2bbf03fcc95dd.pdf. 8. David Kirkland, “What the Gifted Education Fight Is Really About,” NYDN, Sept. 20, 2019. 9. McGraw notes that one-­fifth of public school kindergarten students are white. He has not seen much evidence of flight from NYC’s Asian American families, whose more precarious economic status affords them fewer exit options than white families. McGraw, video interview; NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, “New York City Government Poverty Measure 2018,” 2020, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/opportunity/ pdf/20_poverty_measure_report. 10. See, for example, John L. Rury, “Race, Space, and the Politics of Chicago’s Public Schools: Benjamin Willis and the Tragedy of Urban Education,” History of Education Quarterly, 39, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 117–­142; Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017). On Detroit, see Jeffrey Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907–­1981, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). For a far-­reaching analysis of school integration activism outside the South, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), ch. 13. 11. New York Appleseed, New York City Elementary Schools: A Tale of Two Cities, Feb. 2016, https://nyappleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/FINAL-Appleseed-New-YorkCity-Elementary-Schools.pdf. 12. Stephenson, Teens Take Charge interview by author. 13. Matt Barnum and Claire Bryan, “America’s Great Remote-­Learning Experiment: What Surveys of Teachers and Parents Tell Us about How It Went,” Chalkbeat, June 26, 2020, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/26/21304405/surveys-remote-learning -coronavirus-success-failure-teachers-parents. See also Benjamin Herold, “The Disparities

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in Remote Learning under Coronavirus (in Charts),” Education Week, April 10, 2020, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/04/10/the-disparities-in-remote-learningunder-coronavirus.html; Educators for Excellence, Voices from the Virtual Classroom: A Survey of America’s Teachers on COVID-­19-­Related Education Issues, 2020, https://e4e. org/sites/default/files/voices_from_the_virtual_classroom_2020.pdf. 14. Christina Veiga, “After Coronavirus: Admissions for NYC’s ‘Screened’ Schools Could Change, Possibly Spurring More Student Diversity,” Chalkbeat New York, May 5, 2020, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2020/5/5/21247484/coronavirus-screens-school-diversity. 15. McGraw, interview. 16. Eliza Shapiro, “New York City Will Change Many Selective Schools to Address Segregation,” NYT, Dec. 18, 2020. 17. Christina Veiga, “NYC Announces Sweeping Changes to Middle, High School Application Process,” Chalkbeat New York, Dec. 18, 2020, https://ny.chalkbeat. org/2020/12/18/22188384/changes-nyc-school-application-process. 18. Christina Veiga, “‘The Time for Change Is Now’: At Lab, Roosevelt and Baruch, Principals Favor Scrapping District 2 Priority,” Chalkbeat New York, Dec. 15, 2020, https:// ny.chalkbeat.org/2020/12/15/22177338/district-2-principals-geographic-priority. School demographic data at InsideSchools, “Eleanor Roosevelt High School,” https://insideschools.org/school/02M416. 19. NYC Department of Education, “December 18, 2020: Update for Families on High School Admissions,” https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/news/ chancellor-s-message-for-families. 20. Veiga, “NYC Announces Sweeping Changes.” 21. Christina Veiga, “Here’s How NYC Will Admit Students to ‘Gifted’ Programs for 2021,” Chalkbeat New York, Feb. 17, 2021, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/17/22288448/ nyc-gifted-admissions-2021. 22. Laura Meckler and Hannah Nathanson, “Schools, Caught by Pandemic and Confronting Systemic Racism, Jettison Testing for Admissions,” WP, Dec. 18, 2020. In November 2020, Teens Take Charge filed a complaint with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that NYC’s admissions screening violated students’ rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See Teens Take Charge vs. New York City Department of Education, Complaint Pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nov. 16, 2020, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58f94bd2579fb3435961c3f5/t/5fb5349a 0854774b8820dcb1/1605711024496/Teens+Take+Charge+vs.+NYCDOE+Complaint.pdf. 23. Nyah Berg (Integrated Schools project director, New York Appleseed), video interview by author, July 31, 2020.

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Selected Bibliography

Abu-­Lughod, Janet L. Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bonastia, Christopher. Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Braddock II, Jomills Henry, and Tamela McNulty Eitle. “The Effects of School Desegregation.” In Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, edited by James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, 828–­43. San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass, 2004. Cannato, Vincent J. The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Carter, Barbara. Pickets, Parents, and Power: The Story Behind the New York City Teachers’ Strike. New York: Citation Press, 1971. Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Collins, Christina. “Ethnically Qualified”: Race, Merit, and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920–­1980. New York: Teachers College Press, 2011. Crespino, Joseph. “The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: The Stennis Amendment and the Fracturing of Liberal School Desegregation Policy, 1964–­1972.” Journal of Policy History 18, no. 3 (July 2006): 304–­25. Delmont, Matthew F. Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Eisenberg, Carolyn. “The Parents Movement at I.S. 201: From Integration to Black Power, 1956–­66.” PhD diss., Columbia University, Political Science, 1971. ProQuest 288081211. Erickson, Ansley T., and Ernest Morrell, eds. Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Farmer, Ashley D. “‘All the Progress to Be Made Will Be Made by Maladjusted Negroes’: Mae Mallory, Black Women’s Activism, and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition.” Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 508–­30. Ferguson, Karen. Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

289

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290

Selected Bibliography

Flamm, Michael W. In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Freeman, Joshua B. Working-­Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. New York: New Press, 2001. Geringer-Sameth, Ethan. “New York City Is Waist-­Deep in a School Desegregation Conversation—­How Did We Get Here?” Gotham Gazette, Sept. 3, 2019, https:// www.gothamgazette.com/city/8769-new-york-city-waist-deep-school-desegregationconversation-how-did-we-get-here-de-blasio. IntegrateNYC. “Real Integration,” 2020, https://www.integratenyc.org/realintegration. In the Matter of Charlene Skipwith and Another, 14 Misc. 2d 325 (1958), Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York, Children’s Court Division, New York County, https:// www.leagle.com/decision/195833914misc2d3251234. Isaacs, Charles S. Inside Ocean Hill–­Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968–­69. Albany: State University of New York Press (Excelsior Editions), 2014. Johnson, Rucker C. Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. With Alexander Nazaryan. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Kahlenberg, Richard D. Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Kucsera, John, with Gary Orfield. New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future, Civil Rights Project, March 2014, https://www. civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/nynorflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf. Lassiter, Matthew D. “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth.” In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, edited by Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, 25–­48. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Lee, Sonia Song-­Ha. Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Mader, Nicole, Clara Hemphill, and Qasim Abbas. The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools. Center for New York Affairs, The New School, May 2018, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/ t/5aecb1c3352f537d3541623b/1525461450469/The+Paradox+of+Choice.pdf. Markowitz, Gerald, and David Rosner. Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Matlin, Daniel. On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Meckler, Laura. “What Happened When Brooklyn Tried to Integrate Its Middle Schools.” Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2019.

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291

New York City Department of Education. “School Diversity Advisory Group.” Accessed June 17, 2021. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/vision-and-mission/ diversity-in-our-schools/school-diversity-advisory-group. Niemeyer, John H., Lilian Ashe, Charles R. DeCarlo, James Marshall, Frederick O’Neal, Celia Vice and Bert E. Swanson. “Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Decentralization,” July 1968. Shapiro Papers, box 1, folder 4. Orfield, Gary. “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation.” In Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, edited by Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton, 291–­330. New York: New Press, 1996. Parrish, Richard. “The New York City Teachers Strikes: Blow to Education, Boon to Racism.” Labor Today, May 1969. Reprint filed in Richard Parrish Papers, additions 2, box 1, folder 20. Perlstein, Daniel H. Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Perrillo, Jonna. Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Phillips-­Fein, Kim. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. Podair, Jerald E. The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean-­Hill Brownsville Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pritchett, Wendell. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Purnell, Brian, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of The South. New York: NYU Press, 2019. Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Ravitch, Diane. The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974. Rickford, Russell. “Integration, Black Nationalism, and Radical Democratic Transformation in African American Philosophies of Education, 1965–­74.” In The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, edited by Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton, 287–­317. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Rieder, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Rogers, David. 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System. New York: Random House, 1968. School Diversity Advisory Group. Making the Grade: The Path to Real Integration and

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292

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Equity for NYC Public School Students, February 2019, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ug d/1c478c_4de7a85cae884c53a8d48750e0858172.pdf. School Diversity Advisory Group. Making the Grade II: New Programs for Better Schools, August 2019, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_1d5659bd05494f6d8cb2bbf03 fcc95dd.pdf. Shelton, Jon. Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017. State Education Commissioner’s Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions. “Desegregating the Public Schools of New York City,” May 12, 1964. New York State Education Department Commissioner’s History File, series B0460, box 1, folder 64. Stein, Annie. “Strategies for Failure.” Harvard Educational Review 41, no. 2 (May 1971): 158–­204. Superintendent of Schools. Toward Greater Opportunity, June 1960. CIP, box 5, folder 41. Taylor, Clarence. Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle for School Integration in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Wilcox, Preston. “The Controversy Over I.S. 201.” Urban Review, July 1966, 12–­16. Reprint filed in Wilcox Papers, box 24, folder 1.

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Index

Adams, Eric, 239 Addabbo, Joan, 94–95 Adickes, Sandra, 61 admissions screening, 8, 9, 17, 209–11, 218, 221, 225–29, 238–40, 280n23, 287n5, 288n22 Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions. See Allen Report African Americans, 5, 21, 47, 51, 92, 104, 137, 144, 156, 176; Black antiSemitism, 109; Black boycotts, 85; Black genocide, 162; Black oppression, as dangerous, 92–93; Jewish Americans, disconnect between, 109–10; racial otherness, 108 African-American Teachers Association (ATA), 142, 146, 148–49, 155, 249n56 AFSCME, 194 Alabama, 14, 44, 87, 172–73, 175 Albany (New York), 79, 105, 164, 221 Allen, James E., 49, 51, 62, 82, 117–18 Allen Report, 16, 82–85, 236, 237 Alston, Marcus, 224 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 76 American Federation of Teachers, 60–61, 76; Black Caucus, 155, 268–69n52 American Jewish Committee, 109 American Jewish Congress, 116; Queens Women’s Division of, 50

American Nazi Party, 172 American Psychological Association, 19–20, 193 American South, ix, 1, 13–15, 24, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 47, 59–60, 68, 87, 88, 91–92, 95, 105, 108, 112, 132, 149, 167, 176–81, 197, 201 Amsterdam Houses, 213 Anker, Irving, 181, 186, 197–98 anti-Blackness, 176–77 Anti-Defamation League, 23, 76, 109, 162 anti-Semitism, 16, 109–11, 162, 171 anti-whiteness, 16, 107, 111 Antonetty, Evelina, 124 Arkansas, 92 Asian students, 8, 11–12, 218, 227, 233 Asian Americans, 287n9 Asian American Student Advocacy Project (ASAP), 230, 234 Aspira, 195 Associated Community Teens, 276–77n73 Association for a Better New York, 219 Atkins, Minerva, 53–54 Atlanta (Georgia), 12 Ayscue, Jennifer, 4 Baker, Ella, 22–23, 25, 28, 32 Baldwin, James, 109–10, 115, 156 Baltimore (Maryland), 120, 181 Banfield, Beryl, 134 Baraka, Amiri, 144. See also Jones, LeRoi

293

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294

Index

Barker, George, 89 Bath Beach (Brooklyn), 58 Bay of Pigs, 67 Bay Ridge (Brooklyn), 114, 191 Beacon High School, 8, 217, 229 Beame, Abraham, 116–17, 208 Becker, Norma, 61 Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), 16, 29, 46, 51, 56, 66, 68, 72, 101, 105, 112, 116, 121, 144; demographics in, 90; overcrowded schools, 54; riots in, 63, 90–92, 173; segregated schools in, 30; transfer students, 48–49, 52–53, 185 Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, 150 Bensonhurst (Brooklyn), 94, 114, 203 Berg, Nyah, 212, 223, 240, 281n29, 282n43 Bergtraum, Murray, 181 Berhan, Sia, 161 Berkeley (California), 120 Bibuild, Elaine, 58–59 Bibuld, Jerome, 58–59 Bilbo, Theodore, 60 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 167 Biondi, Martha, 60 Birbach, Jerry, 184 Birmingham (Alabama), 62, 63, 70 Black Americans. See African Americans Blackness, 166 Black New Yorkers, 13–14, 24, 35, 60, 100, 107, 110, 139. See also African Americans Black Panthers, 135, 158, 170–71 Black Power, 10, 118, 134–35, 137, 166, 172, 174 Black schools, ix, 26, 54, 93, 111, 120, 127, 178, 181; “black survival curriculum,” 141; inferior curriculum, 36; low educational standards, 65; as overcrowded, 114, 236, 252n26 Black students, ix, 2, 10–11, 21, 29, 31, 35–36, 45, 53–55, 60–61, 65–66, 72, 85, 96, 101–2, 104, 110, 136, 138, 152, 166, 168–70, 174, 178–79, 192, 201–2, 218,

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234, 275n43, 279n14, 283n64; longer commutes of, 227; in overcrowded schools, 114, 236, 252n26; Puerto Rican students, relations with, 77–78 blockbusting, 50 Bloomberg, Michael, 208, 212, 213; school choice, 209 Bloomfield, Jack, 141 Blumenfeld, Adrian, 116–17 Board of Education. See New York City Board of Education Board of Examiners, 163 Board of Higher Education, 168 bootstrap liberalism, 110 border checkpoints, 6, 18–19, 70, 79; administrative, 7–10, 15–16, 29, 42, 44, 52, 58, 61, 82, 84, 112, 117, 146, 169, 184, 192–93, 224, 237, 240; administrators and teachers, enacted by, 43, 66; colorblind, 25; meritocratic, 8, 16–17, 22, 43, 65, 86, 143, 211, 213, 240; physical, 7, 9, 26, 29, 49, 56, 74, 86, 187, 202–3, 213, 240; stalling, use of, 82; “white veto,” 10; zoning, 7 Borough Park (Brooklyn), 227 Boston (Massachusetts), 12, 55, 77; school desegregation, 179 boycotts, 65, 70, 75, 85, 93, 100, 104; for integration, 236; school, 77–78, 94, 105, 185, 230, 252n26 Bowery (Manhattan), 214 Breslin, Jimmy, 70–71 Brighton Beach, 202 Bronx, 34, 47, 54, 62, 64, 68–70, 75, 128, 132, 175–76, 204–5, 260n64, 277n87; demographics in, 84 Bronx High School of Science, 135, 217, 220–21 Brooklyn, 31, 33, 45–46, 48, 50, 52–53, 56, 61–63, 85, 90, 93, 101, 102, 107, 116, 119, 121, 136, 146, 169, 174, 211, 225, 229, 277n87; Community Education Council, 212; demographics in, 47, 84; experimental district, 139

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Index

Brooklyn College, 117, 168 Brooklyn College Academy, 229 Brooklyn Five, 165 Brooklyn Heights (Brooklyn), 94, 97–98, 105 Brooklyn Joint Council for Education, 71–72 Brooklyn Public Library, 217 Brooklyn Tech, 216, 220 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 61 Brown, Bertrand, 182 Brown v. Board of Education, 1–2, 9–11, 15–17, 18–20, 23, 25, 28, 36, 55, 61, 103, 105, 108, 127, 223–24, 227, 232, 236, 240, 247n5 Brownsville (Brooklyn), 56, 113–14, 116–18, 122, 165, 167, 185–86, 189–90, 192, 203, 209; public housing, and white flight, 112 Brownsville Community Council (BCC), 113–14, 124 Brownsville Model Cities Committee, 162 Bundy, McGeorge, 123, 125, 143 Bundy Panel, 143 Burns, Edward, 50–51 Bush, George W., 215 Bushwick (Brooklyn), 49–50, 72 busing, 29, 32–33, 38–39, 49–56, 62, 66, 71–72, 78, 93, 98, 114, 123, 127, 131, 179–81; anti-busing, 105, 164, 201; revolt against, 203. See also Open Enrollment Butt, Tahir H., 271n96 Byrnes, James F., 26 California, 2 Cambria Heights Civic Association (Queens), 38 Camiscoli, Sarah Medina, 215 Campbell, Leslie, 5, 144–46, 161–62, 170, 201. See also Weusi, Jitu Canarsie (Brooklyn), 9, 113–14, 116–18, 186–92, 202–4, 232

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295

Carmichael, Stokely, 10, 60, 135. See also Ture, Kwame Carranza, Richard, 1, 219–20, 224–26, 231, 236 Carroll Gardens (Brooklyn), 227 Carter, Barbara, 150–51 Carter, Dan T., 173 Carter, Robert L., 163 Carver, George Washington, 167 Castro, Fidel, 67 Catholic Interracial Council, 116 Cedzich, William, 52 Celler, Emanuel, 88 Center for New York City Affairs, 209, 211 Chaney, James, 87, 89, 150 charter schools, 11, 201, 209, 215, 219, 277n84; as apartheid schools, 211 Chelsea Career and Technical Education HS (CTE), 228 Chester (Pennsylvania), 78 Chicago (Illinois), 2, 10, 12, 77–78, 155, 181–82, 236, 280n23 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU): Black Teachers Caucus, 155 “Children Apart” conference, 23, 25 Chu, Yiatin, 240 Cintron, Roland, 78 City College of New York (CCNY), 20–21, 86 City University of New York (CUNY): free tuition program, 195, 271n96; Open Admissions policy, 168–69; paraprofessional training, 195; Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program, 168 Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools, 62, 64–65, 76 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 15, 22, 88, 92, 105; Title VI, 179–180, 199, 253n43, 283n58, 288n22 Civil Rights Project (CRP), 2, 211–12 civil rights movement, 86–87, 99, 142, 149 Clancy, John, 49 Clark, Hilton, 86

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296

Index

Clark, Kenneth, 10, 18, 20–26, 28, 31, 42–43, 63, 65, 82, 85–86, 92, 93, 115, 130–31, 163, 172, 184, 187, 191–92, 202, 246n4, 247n5, 247–48n23, 276–77n73; doll research, 19; ghetto, resilience in, 272n2; Social Science statement, 19; morality drugs, proposal of, 193; psychotechnological plan, 193, 201 Clark, Mamie, 20–23, 43, 156; doll research, 19, 247n5 Cleveland (Ohio), 77 Clinton, Bill, 98 Cobble Hill (Brooklyn), 227 Colorado, 197 colorblindness, 25, 95, 110–11, 195–96 Commission on Integration (CI), 1, 15–16, 30, 32, 34–38, 40, 42–44, 52, 103, 236–37; permissive zoning, 29; zoning, 28–29, 33, 41. See also Allen Report Community Action Program, 113–14, 129, 135 community-control movement, 5, 16, 32, 106–11, 122, 124, 128–29, 132–36, 139–47, 150–52, 155–59, 161–62, 164, 264n74, 275n43; Black self-determination, 125; and decentralization, 183–84; end of, 163, 171, 183–84, 192–93; integration, as alternative to, 137–38, 170, 185; multiculturalism of, 166–67, 170; reverberations from, 168; school segregation, increase in, 183 Coney Island (Brooklyn), 29, 191 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 58–60, 62–63, 75–77, 79, 89–90, 92, 124, 132, 135, 158 Co-op City, 206 Corona (Queens), 63, 71–72, 94 Cotto-Moreno, Sonia, 165 Cotton, Cleaster, 165–66 Council of Supervisory Associations (CSA), 141, 143, 146–47, 150, 154, 160, 269n60

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COVID-19 pandemic, 17, 226, 228, 230–31, 237–38, 240, 244n14 Craig, Winston, 30 Cramer, William, 88 Crespino, Joseph, 198 Cross-Brooklyn Expressway, 117–18 Cuba, 67, 83 Cumberbatch, Clair, 56 Cuomo, Andrew, 221 Cuomo, Mario, 184 curated integration, 5, 237 Dallas (Texas), 2, 182 Davidoff, Sidney, 149 Davis, Miles, 115 de Blasio, Bill, 7, 17, 214, 219–21, 223–25, 231, 238–40, 244n14, 284n70; integration, failure of, 226; SDAG, launch of, 218; school busing, rejection of, 212 decentralization, 123, 125, 139–40, 143, 149, 151, 153, 161–64, 175, 183–84, 188, 203 de facto segregation, 15, 65, 88, 178, 197 de jure segregation, 15, 88, 178, 180 Delamar, G. William, 35 Delaware, 19 Delmont, Matthew, 15, 55 Democratic Party, 48 Dentler, Robert, 119–20 Denver (Colorado), 197 Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), 179–80; Office for Civil Rights (OCR), 197–200 desegregation, 1–2, 15, 29, 31–32, 35, 54, 65, 83–85, 88, 120, 129, 137, 177–81, 183, 198, 225; as term, 4 Desegregating the Public Schools of New York City, 82. See also Allen Report de Silva, Sufia, 165 Detroit (Michigan), 13, 252n26 Diaz, Manny, 78 “difficult” schools, 33, 36–37, 42, 108, 141–42

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Index

Dinkins, David, 204, 208 diversity, 4–5, 167, 210, 219, 223, 238–39; demographic, 221; ethnic, 201; racial, 8, 213–15, 227; school, 226; socioeconomic, 8, 12, 213–14, 220, 227; staff, 222 Dolphin, Dorothy, 186 Doar, John, 149–50, 156 Dollinger, Marc, 108, 160 Donovan, Bernard, 116, 125–26, 128, 132–34, 140–41, 143–44, 147–51, 157–58, 205, 267n31, 269n59 Donovan, James, 2, 66–67, 69–71, 83, 93–94, 101–2, 116–17 Drive, He Said (Larner), 257n6 Dromm, Daniel, 224 East Brooklyn (Brooklyn), 113–14, 118, 136, 185; Flatlands proposal, 116–17 East Flatbush (Brooklyn), 116, 118, 121, 186, 190–91, 202 East Harlem (Manhattan), 60, 76, 126–27, 130–31, 170, 173–74, 209, 218 East Harlem Project (EHP), 130–31 Eastland, Jim, 30 East Orange (New Jersey), 120 economic inequality, 212 educational activism: parental input, 32 educational inequality, 5, 22, 27, 84 Educational Option schools, 210–11 educational parks, 12, 66, 114, 116–18, 120–21, 205–7; school segregation, 208; skepticism about, 119–20 Education Amendments of 1972: Title IX, 199 Edwards, Babette, 124, 133–34, 138, 201 Edwards, Monifa, 164–66 Eleanor Roosevelt High School, 239 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 22, 200 Elliott, Donald H., 118 Emergency Ad Hoc Committee of Parents for Community Control, 183 Emergent Multilingual Learners (MLLs), 221

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297

EQUAL, 100–101, 104, 124 Erickson, Ansley T., 243n9, 243–44n13 Ervin, Sam, 164 Evans, Rowland, 103–4 Fantini, Mario, 139–40 Farina, Carmen, 219 Farmer, James, 60, 92 Faubus, Orval, 49, 92 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 87 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 161 Fenster, Myron, 92 Ferguson, Herman, 141, 144, 266n7 Ferguson, Karen, 125, 139 Flatbush (Brooklyn), 102, 117–18, 204 Flatlands (Brooklyn), 116–18, 192 Flint (Michigan), 244–45n23 Florida, 177 Flushing (Queens), 100 Ford Foundation, 107, 123, 125, 136, 143; demonstration districts, 139–40, 144, 147 Forest Hills (Queens), 184 Fort Greene-Clinton Hill, 101–2 Fourteenth Amendment, 40 Frankenberg, Erica, 4 Free Choice plan, 66, 82 free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL), 238–39 Freedomland Recreational Park, 205 Freedom Movement, 154; Freedom Riders, 60; Freedom Schools, 60–61, 68–69, 153, 155; Freedom Summer, 105 freedom of choice plans. See school desegregation Freeman, Joshua B., 61, 169 Fresno (California), 182 Fuentes, Luis, 141 Fuller, Henry R., 117 Fulmer, Chet, 101–3 Fulmer, Dot, 101–3 Funnye, Clarence, 132

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298

Index

Galamison, Milton, 13, 29–30, 38, 55–57, 61–62, 64–71, 75–79, 87, 94, 101, 104–5, 113, 118, 124, 130, 149, 156, 163 Garrett, Henry, 19–20 Garrison, Lloyd, 123–24, 133 Gee, Veronica, 165 Genovese, Kitty, 260n70 Georgia, 18, 56 Gerber, Irving, 141 Gerena Valentín, Gilberto, 75, 77–79, 256n103 Gerry, Martin, 200 “ghetto schools,” 148, 202, 247n20 Gifted and Talented (G&T) programs, 209–10, 221, 225–26, 237, 239 Gilligan, Thomas, 88–89, 91 Girls High School (Brooklyn), 66, 85 Giuliani, Rudy, 208 Glazer, Nathan, 184 Glendale-Ridgewood (Queens), 9, 16, 46, 54, 71–72, 232; transfer program, 56, 185; transfer program, hostility to, 48–51, 53–56; transfer students, 52 Glendale Taxpayers Association (GTA), 49–51, 53 Gold, August, 207 Goldwater, Barry, 88, 92 Gomez, Julisa Perez, 216 Gonzales, Matt, 226 Goodman, Andrew, 87, 89, 150 Gordon, Jane Anna, 109–10 Gore, Robert, 75 Gottehrer, Barry, 149 Gottlieb, Edward, 101 Gravesend (Brooklyn), 164 Gray, Jesse, 78 Gregory, Dick, 69, 78 Gross, Calvin, 62, 64, 66–68, 71, 87, 94–96, 102 Gunning, Rosemary R., 74 Gutman, Marta, 127 Halifax County (Virginia), 20 Hamilton, Thelma, 124 Hansberry, Lorraine, 115

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Harlem (Manhattan), 14, 20–25, 35–36, 40, 60, 66, 70, 76, 85, 96–97, 101, 104–5, 115, 125–26, 128, 130, 132, 134–37, 168, 176, 182, 225; charter schools, 201; experimental district, 139; Harlem Nine, 39, 41, 43, 58–59; riots in, 14, 24, 62–63, 89–92, 133, 173, 246n4; Spanish Harlem, 75. See also IS 201 community control district Harlem Community Council on Housing, 78 Harlem Parents Committee (HPC), 62, 76, 128, 137–38 Harlem schools, 25, 34, 39, 41, 85, 86, 101, 115–16, 167, 196–97; “cultural deprivation,” 43; study of segregation, 20; substitute and new teachers, disproportionate number of, 21, 35–36 Harris, William, 141, 152 Harry S. Truman High School, 206–7 HARYOU-ACT, 124, 135, 276–77n73 Hayes, Fred, 123 Head Start, 114 Healy, May, 38 Hechinger, Fred, 136 Hemphill, Clara, 209 Higher Horizons program, 43, 54 High School Teachers Association (HSTA), 37 Highsmith, Andrew R., 244–45n23 Hitler, Adolf, 162, 200 housing segregation. See residential segregation Houston (Texas), 12 Howe, Harold, 134 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 119 individualism, 97 Innis, Roy, 135 Integrate NYC (INC), 215; 5 Rs of Real Integration, 219–22, 227, 230–31, 237 integration, 106, 177, 215, 223, 236, 238; changing conceptions of, 4–5, 137, 160, 166–67, 170, 182, 219–20, 232–33,

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Index

237; statistical, 4, 9; as term, 4; white acceptance of, 105 Intergroup Committee on New York’s Public Schools, 25, 50, 247–48n23 Invisible Man (Ellison), 100 IS 201 community control district, 125–28, 132–36, 139, 167, 182, 201 Isaacs, Charlie, 151–52, 155–58, 160, 162–63, 166, 170, 269n59 Italian American Civil Rights League, 191 Italian Americans, 169, 176, 203 Jack, Hulan, 63 Jackson Heights (Queens), 9, 71–72, 94–97, 232 Jamaica (Queens), 33 Jamal, Hebh, 217 Jansen, William, 20–21, 33; stalling tactics of, 29–31 Javits, Jacob, 30, 69, 181–82 Javits, Marion, 175 Jencks, Christopher, 279n14 Jewish Americans: African Americans, disconnect between, 109–10; racial otherness, 108 Jewish anti-Blackness, 109 Jewish Defense League, 161 Jim Crow, 13, 15, 25–26, 30, 55, 60 Johnson, Danielle, 233 Johnson, Lyndon B., 87–88, 91–92, 113–14, 125 Johnson, Rucker C., 5 Joint Committee of Teacher Organizations, 38 Joint Council for Better Education, 93 Jones, Fred, 75–76 Jones, James Earl, 156 Jones, LeRoi, 144, 156. See also Baraka, Amiri Juravich, Nick, 194 juvenile delinquency, 49–50, 54 Kahlenberg, Richard, 109, 194 Kaiser, Margaret, 48 Kansas, 19

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299

Kaplan, Nathaniel, 40–41 Karp, Richard, 112 Katz, Daniel, 213 Kelman, Herbert, 193 Kennedy, John F., 125 Kennedy, Robert F., 87 Kent School, 86 Kessler, Bernard, 72, 94 Kessler, Felix, 98 Keyes v. School District No. 1, 197 King Jr., Martin Luther, 91, 120, 142, 145, 160–61, 173; on racial progress, 92 Kirkland, David, 235 Klein, Joel, 209 Klineberg, Otto, 24 Koch, Edward, 208 Koretz, Judy, 188 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 90, 160–61, 172 Lachman, Seymour, 191–92 Lander, Brad, 212–14, 224, 227 Larner, Jeremy, 83–84, 257n6 Lassiter, Matthew, 15, 198 Latino schools, 235–36. See also Puerto Rican schools Latino students, 2, 11–12, 220, 227, 239, 283n64. See also Puerto Rican students Lee, David, 141 Lee, Sonia Song-Ha, 78, 127, 195 Lehman College, 234; High School of American Studies at, 233 Leon Goldstein HS, 216 Lester, Julius, 161 Let Us Break Bread Together (promotional film), 26 Levitt, Arthur, 25–26, 28 Lewer, Brittney, 201 Lewis, Heather, 208 Lewis, John, 92 liberalism: eclipse of, 110; Northern racial liberalism, ideals, living up to, 59; racial inequality, 13 “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (song), 167 Lincoln Towers, 213

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300

Index

Lindsay, John, 111–19, 123, 128, 133, 138, 142, 149–51, 154, 156, 158, 163, 171, 173–74, 182, 189; busing, backing of, 181; as “limousine liberal,” 175, 177 linear city, 117–18 Lisser, Stanley, 132, 134–35 Little Rock (Arkansas), 41, 49–50, 53, 189, 240 Little Rock Nine, 39 Lockwood, Stephen, 140 Long Island, 11, 47 Los Angeles (California), 12, 47 Louisiana, 168, 172 Lower East Side (Manhattan), 126, 136, 214 Luce, Brandon, 240 Luna, Nelson, 216–17, 230 Lurie, Ellen, 100–101, 104, 124 Lynch, Walter, 140 lynching, 69 Malcolm X, 60, 78–79, 86, 92, 104–5, 115, 144 Mallory, Mae, 39, 250n65 Malverne (New York), 93 Manhattan, 26, 42, 46, 59, 62–63, 75, 88, 100–101, 125–26, 176, 211, 214, 225, 228, 239, 277n87; demographics in, 47, 84 Manhattan Country School (MCS), 131 Marable, Manning, 105 Marcantonio, Vito, 60 March for Democratic Schools, 79 Marchi, John, 123, 175 March on Washington, 61, 69, 256n103 Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 164 Matlin, Daniel, 22, 193 Mayer, Martin, 162–63, 269n59 Mayor Lindsay’s Urban Task Force, 152 Mayor’s Advisory Panel on Decentralization (MAP), 13 Mayor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlem, 24 McCoy, Rhody, 108, 140–41, 143, 144–50, 152–53, 157–60, 162–64, 194

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McGraw, Taylor, 9, 216–17, 226, 235, 238, 287n9 McManus, Bob, 224 McNamara, John, 36 McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie, 96 Meredith, James, 63, 149–50 Merin, Maia, 136 meritocracy, 8, 12, 15, 114–15; colorblind, 9–10, 110–12, 142, 195. See also colorblindness Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC), 191–92 Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), 11–12 Meyer, Agnes E., 33–34 Miami (Florida), 83 Michel, Dorothy Limerick, 72–73, 95 Midwood (Brooklyn), 103 military segregation, 60 Miller, Wilbert, 188 Milliken v. Bradley, 178, 198, 205 Mills College of Education, 23 Mills, Zipporiah, 167, 209–10 Milwaukee (Wisconsin), 77 minority children: defeatist attitude, 24; inferior status, 23 Ministers Association (GlendaleRidgewood), 52 Minter, Thomas, 132–33 Miseducation (podcast), 216 Mississippi, 61, 64, 87, 89, 91–92, 105, 150, 155, 160, 177, 240 Mississippi Freedom Schools, 61 Mississippi Project, 61 Mitchell, Clarence, 180–81 Mobilization for Youth, 78 Mondale, Walter, 180 Montgomery bus strike, 14 Morales, Jorge, 217–18 More Effective Schools program, 102, 142 Moses, Robert, 44; as master builder, 207 Motley, Constance Baker, 90–91 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 200 Myrdal, Gunnar, 21

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Index

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 13, 22–23, 30, 32, 38–39, 54, 56, 62–63, 65, 76–77, 79, 87, 91, 116, 158, 163, 178, 180, 199, 201; Legal Defense Fund, 19 National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, 75–76, 78 Nation of Islam, 78, 135 National Teacher Examination, 163 Nauman, Fred, 166 Ndiaye, Sokhnadiarra, 223–24 Negro Teachers Association, 36, 249n56 neighborhood schools, 37, 39, 46–47, 55, 99, 105, 236; school integration, 44, 49–50, 71 Nevins, Thomas, 95–96 New Jersey, 11 New Rochelle (New York), 93 New York Appleseed, 212, 231, 237 New York City, 11, 15–17, 32, 41, 44, 56, 60–61, 65, 68, 70, 73, 93, 101–3, 105, 107, 120, 143, 155, 169, 176–77, 182–83, 189, 209–10, 222, 230, 232–37, 260n70; Black inequality in, 24; Black population in, 47; “city in crisis,” 174; community control, abandoning of, 192–93; demographics in, 47, 59, 84; desegregation efforts, 198; fair housing laws, 46; fiscal crisis, 195–97, 208; human rights law, 229; Jim Crow in, 13; racial conflict, 62–64, 87–92; rapid racial change in, 47–48; residential segregation, 47; school integration, 1–2, 25, 84, 179, 192; school segregation, conference on, 23; school integration, fighting of, 192; school integration, as moribund, 205; school segregation, as “natural,” 20–21; school system, as segregated, 2; self-image of, as progressive, 13, 79; teachers’ aides in low-income schools, 194; teacher unions, 111; white backlash, 99; white flight, 83.

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301

See also individual boroughs and individual neighborhoods New York City Alliance for School Integration and Diversity (NYCASID), 21, 231 New York City Board of Education (BOE), 2, 4–5, 11, 20, 34, 37, 43–44, 57, 72, 93–94, 98, 102, 107, 111, 114, 121, 123–24, 137, 144, 147, 153, 156, 163–64, 171, 184–85, 204, 208, 232, 269n59, 269n60; admissions screening, 9; border checkpoints, utilizing of, 6–10, 15–16, 18–19; boycott against, 64–71, 74, 76–79, 82; bureaucracy of, 143; civil rights demonstrations, on behalf of Puerto Ricans, 74–75; Committee for School Integration, 67–68; community control, and mollifying, 169–70; community control movement, and unmet promises on school integration, as result of, 136; containment, through segregation, 6; and decentralization, 140, 149, 151, 175; delaying tactics, 61; demonstration districts, 122, 125–26, 169; disruptive demonstrations, 168; distance learning, 17; educational parks, 116–18, 207; experimental districts/plans, 139–40, 145–46; 4-4-4 plan, 84; ideology and practice, gulf between, 11; intimidation tactics, 7; integration, and mollifying, 12, 15, 143, 169–70; integration plans, 62, 68; integration in theory but not in practice, 38–39, 164; Jewish teachers, 12; linear city, 117–18; Office of School Facilities Planning, 127; open enrollment, 104; overcrowding, 48, 55; paras, hiring of, 194–95; “racial balance,” 81; resisting change, 3, 8–9, 12; school integration, preferred approach to, 26–27; school integration, sabotaging of, 113; school pairing, 99; school-pairing experiments, 73–74; sit-ins, 59;

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302

Index

New York City Board of Education (continued) site selection, 41–42, 80; sorting of students, 9; strikes, 154; teaching force, racial composition, 12; student transfers, 48–49, 51–52, 54–56, 73, 81–82, 85; trust in, as diminishing, 81; white veto, 10; zoning, 46, 56, 80. See also Commission on Integration, school integration, New York City Department of Education New York City Department of Education, 232, 238. See also New York City Board of Education New York City Parks Department, 23 New York City school system, 11–12, 69, 107, 114–15, 204, 228, 229, 240, 249–50n58; bilingual classes, 167; COVID-19, effect on, 237, 238; decentralizing of, 123, 125; demographic shifts, 82–83; Discovery plan, 283n64; fiscal crisis, effect on, 196; geographic preference, 238; HEW, OCR lawsuit against, 198–201; high school demographics, 212; high school graduation rates, and admissions criteria, 211; as hypocritical, 78–79; Jim Crow, 25–26, 30; in integrated neighborhoods, 26; integration efforts, 18; mayoral control, 208; principals in, 129, 134; racial gerrymandering, 26, 29, 35, 38; racial issues, investigation of, 197; remote learning, 226; school demographics, 281n28; school demographics and school quality, 237; school district lines, redrawing of, 26; as segregated, denial of, 67; segregation in, 26–27, 212; segregation in, as intentional, 26; “spiral of decline,” 143; voluntary integration, 81; white students, 11 New York Police Department (NYPD), 284n70

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New York Public Library, 23 New York State, 92; school segregation, 2, 18, 211–12 Nichol, Robert, 124 Nicholson, Jack, 257n6 Nixon, Richard M., 163, 179, 181, 193 No Child Left Behind Act, 208–9 North Carolina, 180 North East Bronx Educational Park, 205 Northern Freedom Riders, 60 Northside Center for Child Development, 20, 23, 43, 276– 77n73; educational services, as key component of, 22. See also Northside Testing and Consultation Center Northside Testing and Consultation Center, 22. See also Northside Center for Child Development Novak, Robert, 103–4 numerical integration, 3–4, 7, 16, 55, 179, 182, 233–34 Nunes, Leanne, 230, 233 Nuremberg laws, 200 NYC iSchool, 228 Nyquist, Ewald, 189 Obama, Barack, 215 Ocean Hill-Brownsville (OHB), 16, 107, 109–13, 116, 122, 128, 136–37, 144, 155, 170, 174, 203, 224, 269n59; Blackness, celebration of, 166; as cesspool of anti-Semitism, claim of, 162, 171; community control, 143, 161; community control, end of, 163; curriculum, 166–67; as demonstration district, 125; grants to, 139–40; Governing Board, 108, 112, 121, 138, 140–42, 145–46, 148–54, 156–57, 159–60, 163–64, 167; paras, 194; picket lines, 151; replacement (loyal) teachers, 150–51, 156–57, 159–60, 164, 166; school boycotts,

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Index

145, 149; school strikes, 151–53, 158, 171; teacher transfers, 142–43; teacher walkouts, 149, 157 O’Daley, Elizabeth, 101–2 Oliver, Herbert C., 140, 146, 152, 159, 162–63 open admission schools, 210 Open Enrollment (OE) program, 57–58, 64, 66, 82, 96, 114–15, 137; reverse OE, 102–3, 260n64. See also busing open housing, 46, 93 Orange (New Jersey), 93 Orfield, Gary, 178 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 135 overcrowded schools, 45–48, 51, 54–55, 58, 64, 68, 76, 81, 113–15, 121–22, 130, 185, 199, 212, 249–50n58, 252n26; double shifts, 236 Pacheco, Stephanie, 218 Palmer, Joe, 75 Parents and Taxpayers Association (PAT), 71–72, 80, 87, 93–96, 99–100, 102, 104–5; Coordinating Council, 74 Parents in Action against Educational Discrimination, 32 Parents Committee for Better Education, 35 Parents for an Educational Park (PEP), 116 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al., 214–15 Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, 240 Parent-Teacher Associations, 119, 213, 222 Parents Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools, 56–57, 61–62, 76 Park Slope (Brooklyn), 58, 212, 227 Parrish, Richard, 60, 153–55, 276–77n73 Pattillo, Mary, 232–33, 272n2, 280n23 Pennsylvania, 11

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303

People’s Board of Education, 124, 201 Percy, Charles, 182 Perlstein, Daniel, 109–10 Perrillo, Jonna, 110–11, 196 Phoenix (Arizona), 182 Philadelphia (Mississippi), 87 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 12, 120 Phillips-Fein, Kim, 196 Phipps, Mamie. See Clark, Mamie Pineda, Zarith, 227 Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), 120 Planning Commission (NYC), 117 Plotkin, Lawrence, 191–92 Podair, Jerald, 12, 110, 269n59 police brutality, 23–24, 89, 91, 142, 173 Polier, Justine Wise, 40 Porter, Meisha Ross, 231 Poston, Ted, 13–14 Powell, Adam Clayton Jr., 78, 91, 113, 276–77n73; Powell Amendment, 60 Powell, James, 88–90 Powell, Lewis, 277n85 Powis, John, 112–14, 124, 140–41 President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 276–77n73 Prince Edward County (Virginia), 19–20, 60–61, 153 Procaccino, Mario, 175–77 Public Education Association (PEA), 23, 25, 27–28, 36, 38, 42 public housing: in middle-class Jewish neighborhoods, 184; and white flight, 112. See also Tilden Houses Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), 195 Puerto Rican Parent-Teacher Association, 78 Puerto Rican schools, 7–8, 32, 66, 73, 81, 85, 101–2, 115, 185, 200; and busing, 78. See also Latino schools Puerto Rican students, 2, 36, 54, 59, 70, 76, 80–81, 95, 114, 145, 147, 166–68, 170, 195; Black students, relations with, 77–78. See also Latino students

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304

Index

Puerto Rico: Labor Migration Division, 23 Purnell, Brian, 15 Queens, 42, 44–50, 52–55, 63, 75, 92–93, 99, 126, 128, 132, 211, 260n70, 277n87; demographics in, 84 Queens College, 60 race-blindness, 110 race liberalism, 111 racial inequality, 13, 32, 110, 177, 212 racial justice, 193; and integration, 130–31; white resistance to, 64 racial unrest, 172 racism, 51, 72, 96, 134, 153, 155, 160–61, 178, 204, 232; march against, 203; “racism tax,” 169 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry), 115 Randolph, A. Philip, 61, 79, 91 Ransby, Barbara, 23 Ravitch, Diane, 79, 82, 249–50n58, 269n59 Reagan, Ronald, 201 Reconnection for Learning (report), 143 Rector, Charles, 39 Rector, Shirley, 39 Red Hook (Brooklyn), 227 Red scares, 36 Rehabilitation Act of 1973, 199 rent strikes, 78 Republic of New Africa, 158 residential segregation, 24, 44, 47, 82–83, 235 reverse integration, 101–103 Reynolds, June, 96–97 Rhum, Coco, 226, 234 Ribicoff, Abraham, 177–80, 183; Ribicoff amendment, 181–82 Richardson, Gloria, 78 Rickford, Russell, 137, 167 Richmond (Staten Island), 84 Richmond (Virginia), 181 Rieder, Jonathan, 202–3 Rivers, Francis E., 150, 163 Robertson, Archibald, 19

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Robinson, Isaiah, 128 Robinson, Jackie, 49, 67, 156 Rochester (New York), 92 Rockefeller, Nelson, 62, 69, 79, 164, 168 Rogers, David, 29, 43, 72, 74, 77–78, 82, 127 Rogers, Ralph, 141 Roy, Concetta, 37 Rubin, Robert, 98 Rustin, Bayard, 61, 69, 78–79, 91, 154, 160 Ryan, James F., 179, 197 Saliani, Dimitri, 239 Sando, Haby, 217 Santaella, Irma Videl, 75 Sausalito (California), 120 Savannah (Georgia), 65 Savitch, Harold, 117 Schomburg, Arthur, 126 Schwerner, Michael, 87, 89, 150 Schneider, George, 49 school boycotts, 69–71, 77, 85, 102, 104–5, 134–35, 145, 149, 207, 230, 236; against school integration, 93–94, 189, 191 school demographics, 4, 8, 12, 80, 214, 219–21, 228, 233, 236–39; as changing, 59, 119, 212 school desegregation, 32, 77–78, 93, 179, 214; freedom of choice, 31, 54, 252n25; violence, threat of, 31, 33 School Diversity Accountability Act, 214 School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), 7, 218–20, 225–26, 237, 244n14; 5 Rs, 221, 223; School Safety Agents, 222, 284n70 school integration, 1, 3–4, 11–12, 15, 17–18, 23, 29–32, 35, 41, 43, 45, 52, 56, 61, 84, 93, 130–31, 134, 143, 182, 208; advocating of, 2, 6–7; blocking of, 6; boycott for, 64–71, 74, 76–79, 82; controlled-choice plan, 214; as “forced,” 48; grassroots activism, ebbing of, 205; implementing, failure of, 2, 6–7; inept handling of, 185–86; meritocracy, 10; middle class, driving

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Index

out of, 36, 80; in neighborhood schools, happening “naturally,” 44; as one-way, 34, 54; as pipe dream, 133; public feedback, 35; push for, as pragmatic, 185; quality education, 85; racial justice, 16; student transfers, 57–58; white counter-protests, 71–73; white majority, preference for, 59; white resistance to, 47, 71, 80; white support for, 100–103; white veto, 10; as zero-sum game, 2 school integration movement, 16, 72; Puerto Ricans, visibility of, 77–78 school pairings, 98, 105; opposition to, 99; white backlash, 99 school segregation, 10, 16–18, 22–25, 29–31, 34, 37–38, 41, 44, 52, 64, 84, 95, 178, 234–35; adverse psychological effects, 19; de facto, 15, 88; de jure, 15, 88; deficiencies of, 40; educational parks, 208; “ethnic balance,” objections to, 38; and gerrymandering, 38; housing segregation, 44; as low priority, 204; residential segregation, as cause of, 36; school zoning policies, 6; segregated housing, patterns of, 20. See also segregated schools school strikes, 107, 142, 149–55, 158, 171 Schreiber, Daniel, 127 screened schools, 8, 209–10, 218, 225–26, 236, 239–40; race-neutral, claim of, 227 Screened Students Against Screens Coalition, 287n5 Scribner, Harvey, 186–88, 190–91 Seattle (Washington), 77 segregated housing, 15, 20, 33, 67, 155, 197, 209. See also residential segregation segregated neighborhoods, 6, 26, 29, 57, 64, 80, 119 segregated schools, 13, 19, 24–26, 28, 30, 33, 38–39, 46, 57, 66, 72, 80, 84–85, 104, 108, 113, 114, 137–38, 155,

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305

198, 215; insufficient staffing, 56; as overcrowded, 64; as substandard, 3. See also school segregation segregation, 95, 105, 179, 213, 231; Northern-style, 15, 181. See also school segregation Selma march, 142 Shagaloff, June, 31, 65 Shanker, Albert, 107, 142, 145, 148–49, 151–53, 156–57, 160–63, 171, 194–95, 268–69n52 Shapiro, Rose, 38 Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs Law, 46 Sharpton, Al, 190, 203 Shaw, Frederick, 206 Sheepshead Bay (Brooklyn), 101–2, 260n62 Shelton, Jon, 196 Silverberg, John E., 117 Silver, Charles, 28–29, 34–35 Simone, Nina, 156 Simpson, Zoe, 229 Skipwith, Bernice, 39 Skipwith decision, 41 Skipwith, Stanley, 39 South Carolina, 19 Specialized High School Aptitude Test (SHSAT), 210, 217, 218, 220, 233 specialized high schools, 25, 34, 210–11, 217–18, 220, 224–25, 239, 283n64, 283n65 Spencer, David X., 124, 182 Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), 217 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA), 182–83 St. Ann’s School, 98 Stark, Abe, 116, 17 State Commissioner of Education, 146–47, 164 Staten Island, 147, 175, 277n87 “Status of Public School Education of Negro and Puerto Rican Children in New York City, The” (PEA), 27–28 Stein, Annie, 6, 30, 56, 84, 113–15, 237

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Index

Steingut, Stanley, 119 Stennis, John, 164, 177–78; Stennis amendment, 179–80 Stephenson, Whitney, 216–17, 238 Stevenson, Adlai, 182 Stevenson, Edward A., 164 structural racism, 212 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 135, 158 Stutz, Rosalie, 124 Stuyvesant High School, 8, 220 Suffolk County, 182 Sullivan, Timothy J., 175 Sunset Park (Brooklyn), 227 Sutton, Percy, 60 Sviridoff, Mitchell, 123 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, 180, 182 Syracuse (New York), 120 Taft, Robert, 183 Taylor, Clarence, 62 Taylor, Gardner C., 41 Taylor Law, 194–95 Teachers Alliance (TA), 37–38 Teachers Guild, 34, 111 teacher strikes, 111, 159, 163, 171, 194–95 Teachers Union, 36 Teaneck (New Jersey), 59, 93, 187–88 Teens Take Charge (TTC), 223–24, 226, 228–230, 240, 288n22 Terrell, Seymore, 176 Theobald, John, 18, 38–39, 41, 49–50, 52, 56–57 Theoharis, Jeanne, 15 Thomas, Lennox, 218 Thurmond, Strom, 164 Tilden Houses, 169, 187–90, 192, 232, 276n59 Till, Emmett, 14 Torres, Dolores, 121–22, 140 Toward Greater Opportunity (report), 41 transfer programs, 7, 10, 37, 50–51, 54, 56, 58, 62, 64, 66, 215, 236; objections to,

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48–49; Open Enrollment, 82, 102; of principals, 134, 142–43; of students, 6, 16, 26, 29, 31, 52–53, 57, 63, 67–68, 73, 81, 101, 104, 114, 117, 130–31, 137, 164, 185, 252n26; of teachers, 33, 36, 42, 108, 142, 144, 148–49, 151, 154, 157, 267n31 Treyger, Mark, 224 Tribeca (Manhattan), 239 Trump, Donald, 215 Ture, Kwame, 10. See also Carmichael, Stokely Two Bridges community control district, 125–26, 136 Uhuru Sasa Shule (Swahili for Freedom Now School), 201 United Bronx Parents, 124 United Federation of Teachers (UFT), 3, 5, 16, 60–61, 107, 111–12, 123, 136, 138–39, 143–48, 150–52, 156–59, 161, 164, 170, 184, 194, 200, 269n59, 269n60; Black community, racial divide between, 155; Black Caucus, 153, 155, 268n49, 268–69n52; and Black teachers, 153; colorblind meritocracy, 10; “ethnic quotas,” 195–96; as Jewish-dominated, 160, 162; More Effective Schools program, 141–42; strikes, 142, 153–55, 159, 163; Unity Caucus, 268–69n52 United Housing Federation (UHF), 206 United Nations (UN): United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 27 United Parents Association (UPA), 51, 58, 74, 119 United States, 5, 15, 18, 177, 179; antibusing fervor, 201; racial tension, 103 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 120 University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA): Civil Rights Project, 2 University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), 63, 149–50

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Index

Upper East Side (Manhattan), 239 Upper West Side (Manhattan), 213, 225 Upstate New York, 11 urban inequality: school reform, 208 Urban League, 20, 23, 25, 75, 77, 91, 116 Valle, Marta, 130–31 Vann, Albert, 142, 145–46, 151, 156, 162 Vietnam War, 125, 172 Villamil, Carmen Lopez, 229 Virginia, 155 vocational high schools, 8–9, 70 Voting Rights Act, 105 Wagner, Lilian, 123 Wagner, Robert Jr., 20, 30, 32, 36, 39, 49, 62, 76, 79, 90–91, 93, 116–17, 175 Walker, Wyatt T., 156 Wallace, George C., 6, 172–73, 175–76 Wallack, Josh, 229 Walsh, Camille, 10 Walters, Vivian, 135 Wardlaw, Beatrice, 49 War on Poverty, 140; Community Action Program, 113–14 Warren, Carl, 102 Warren, Robert Penn, 87 Washington, DC, 20, 60–61 Washington Heights (Manhattan), 101 Watts revolt, 172 WBAI (radio station), 161 Wechsler, James, 71 Weddington, Rachel, 61 Weiner, Melissa, 108, 110 West Indies, 47 West Village (Manhattan), 239 Weusi, Jitu, 5, 170, 201. See also Campbell, Leslie white backlash, 99, 103–4 white citizens councils, 49 white exodus, 99, 205 white flight, 44, 93, 202; public housing, 112, 184

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white liberalism, 13, 38, 73, 76, 92, 98, 125; racial justice, 87 whiteness, 232–33 white resistance, 2, 16, 47, 64; to racial justice, 177; to school integration, 71–72, 80, 105; to school pairings, 92–98; women, as rank-and-file participants, 72–73 white schools, 28, 31, 34, 36, 39–40, 54–55, 57, 64–66, 74, 81, 85, 97, 99, 104, 114, 169, 185, 198, 236–37 white students, ix, 8, 11, 17, 53–54, 61, 66, 73, 83, 95, 97–98, 102, 114, 128, 132, 137, 169, 185, 190, 198, 211, 227, 279n14 white supremacy, 131 White, Theodore H., 104 white veto, 10, 11, 34, 44, 235, 240 Wilcox, David, 131 Wilcox, Preston, 5, 129–31, 178, 194, 264n74; as father of community control, 128 Wiley, Maya, 221 Wilkins, Roy, 31–32, 65, 87, 91, 141, 178, 192 Williamsburg (Brooklyn), 56 Wisconsin, 177 Women’s Talent Corps (WTC), 194 World War II, 47, 83, 94, 108–9 Wright, Samuel, 140, 163 Yorkville (Manhattan), 88–89, 128, 130 Young Lords Organization (YLO), 171; Garbage Offensive, 170 Young, Whitney, 91, 141, 163 Zapiler, Sarah “Zaps,” 215–16, 222, 228, 230–31 Ziegler, Ronald, 179 zoning, 6–7, 28, 31, 33, 37–38, 41, 56, 80, 116, 180–81, 188, 198; permissive, 29; re-zoning, 34, 35, 131 Zuber, Paul, 35–36, 39, 41

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